I hate to say it, because I’m an orderly Germanic type, but I think by far the best way to put pressure on a public company is by embarrassing public demonstration, whether physical or virtual.

I’ve made a few calls and sent a few letters and filled out a few web pages, and we’ll see which of those things gets a result.

Fortunately, it’s easy to get the name and address of the CEO of a public company, and I assume that someone in that kind of role is good at delegating responsibility and seeing that things get done.

One of the themes from Saturday’s budget retreat was the importance of communication about service delivery. The idea is that it’s one thing when the service delivery is bad, but it’s another when service delivery is actually okay, but communication about it is poor.

Right now, Sue McCormick said, the snow plowing information page is manually updated by someone walking from the snow plowing “war room” at the Wheeler Center to another room to log the information for the website.

So there is some communication about snow plowing activity now. But Councilmember Christopher Taylor sketched the vision of a possible communication system: GPS transmitters on plow trucks with real-time data displayed on a web map. To that I’d add: opt in automatic telephone notification: “A plow truck is currently at 7th and Liberty heading west.” Or whatever makes the most sense.

It’s easy to take potshots at this sort of thing: does any of this help plow the actual snow? Well, no. But having information about progress makes a huge difference about how people feel about the quality of the service. With computing, think about the display bars that tell you how much of a file has been downloaded. We feel more content that, yep, something is happening. Or think about the ability to track a package sent by UPS or FedEx. Does knowing where it is help it get there faster? Nope. But it satisfies some need to know that, yes, it’s still on its way.

In sum, communication like that about service delivery can improve perception about the quality of the service delivery, with no additional investment in its actual quality. It’s still a fair question to ask though, if we have X additional dollars to invest, do we invest it in communication about the service, or in the service itself.