Let me take you back to a simpler time when people helped people. I’m not talking about Little House on the Prairie times, but probably late-70s and early 80s where computers began to dominate the scene. Since this time our fascination and zombie-like attitude toward information technology (IT) has continued . . . at great cost.
A combination of media, business and government with unbridled exuberance has done nothing to . . . well, keep things in perspective. When improvement is needed we turn to technology. Innovation leadership can not be achieved without IT, correct? Wrong, and not just wrong but costly wrong.
In our collective psyche we have managed to place IT on such a pedestal it has become a dominate industry, more so than the industries to which they serve. But in a management paradox, IT has failed to deliver in many cases. And I am not just talking about missed schedules and cost over-runs.
The problem is that in our rush to go paperless (never happened) and automate (not always a good idea), we lost track of the ability to design and manage work optimally. The current thinking of outsourcing, shared services, business analytics, Business Process Management, IVRs would never have been possible without Information Technology. But one question never seems to get asked, "Since IT can, should it?"
I have to say a resounding NO is in order. In fact, I would submit to you that larger gains in innovation can be achieved through better thinking around the design and management of work and pulling IT into the work as needed is more in order. Then maybe, just maybe we can learn that cost reduction and business improvement can come from better thinking and not IT.
Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.
Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public). His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work. Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com "Understanding Your Organization as a System" and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected]. Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.
public sector it began with the budget, filtering down the numbers by function (sales, operations, etc) and then monitoring the numbers in executive or functional meetings with performance against plan. Riches for those that make the numbers or unwanted attention (or worse) to those that don’t.
I have posted many times on this subject, yet as companies find ways to "save money" they turn to technology that increase costs, makes customers shake their heads and take actions that make companies more unprofitable and less competitive. Really, enough with the snake-oil and one of the worse technologies ever invented . . . the IVR.
OK, Labor Day and I’m looking for a picture of istock.com that depicts the cooperation between workers and management . . . none found. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by the absence of such a picture. The management and the work have been separated for far too long . . . one of the reasons we have too many chiefs and not enough indians. You can either be counted as a manager that does something (command, control, edicts, policies, rules, etc.) to someone or be the someone and most people don’t like to be the someone. Because the someone gets coaching, appraisals, targets, carrots, sticks and when things really get bad blamed or reduced. If that isn’t enough, management gives the someone tools and technology that make the work harder. By the way, I am not talking about your company . . . I’m talking about the other company. Like Congress, it’s not MY representative it’s the other ones.
What if I were to tell you . . . it is not the representative’s fault? Indulge me for a moment.
back to the supporting role it once had, up until IT vendors started selling solutions with out understanding the problem . . . and the problem is variety of demand. The work and the people who understand the work need to "pull" technology as needed to enable the work that needs to be done. Something all service organizations need to improve to achieve corporate cost reductions that last.
and the people in it actually understand the work being done between the customer and their organization and (2) that the boardroom actually understands how to run the organization as a system. Those are two items that would be a stretch for any service organization, but are needed to achieve business improvement.
my website. The command and control approach which is diametrically different than systems approach I promote (see 
I have been a part of many "discussions" this week. Most of them around my posts that challenge conventional wisdom on things such as best practices, targets and incentives. I usually find that people conclude that organizations just aren’t using it (technology, measures, rewards, etc.) right or people are to blame (stupid people). When I suggest it may have to do something with the way we think about the design and management of work . . . the response is some variation of "no, that isn’t it."
First of all, let’s not look at the cup as half empty for Zappos, because I believe it is two-thirds full. At the Economist Marketing Forum held in San Francisco this year Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) and two CMO’s from Del Monte and Frito Lay discussed the role of marketing in their organizations amongst other things (watch: Ties That Must Bind: Why CEOs Rely on CMOs More Than Ever). The poor guys in the traditional roles of CMOs (by function) had to listen to Tony say that they really didn’t have a marketing function at Zappos. They reinvested into customer service and the better service was the marketing for Zappos. I thought the others would spontaneously combust.
command and control thinking and systems thinking. Both types of thinking require us to plan for resources using call volumes and duration. The similarities pretty much end there.
Systems thinking focuses on the customer and more importantly the customer purpose and measures from their perspective. They understand that the focus is the system, not the individual. That performance of an organization is 95% determined by the system they work end and only 5% is attributable to the individual. They also understand that call center management’s job is to manage this system and leave decision-making about the work with the work instead of some report. They understand that failure demand (unwanted calls, problems, follow-ups, missed appointments, etc.) make up between 25% and 75% of all calls in a call center. They understand that the call center is part of a broader system and not a part to be outsourced to reduce transaction costs or share services to cut costs without first studying customer demand and eliminating waste BEFORE such ventures. They understand that targets and incentives become the defacto purpose of the worker and the real purpose is tied to serving the customer.
Disney movies always take me back to a simpler fantasy world away from the realities of business and life. I couldn’t wait until my kids were old enough to watch Disney movies mostly so I could watch them with them and relive the fantasy world I so enjoyed as a child. And to see my children wide-eyed at their first sight of the Magic Kingdom and Mickey. It is a great experience as an adult even though the highlight for my children now-a-days is who gets to push the elevator button first.
physician friend died after accidentally cutting himself dissecting a corpse. the symptoms were strangely similar to that of childbed fever. With no knowledge of infection at the time, Dr. Semmelweiss was able to conclude that physicians were commingling infection one patient to another through the physicians themselves. His discovery was nothing short of brilliant, he found that by having physicians and other care givers wash their hands the death rate spiraled down to almost zero. But Semmelweiss ran into a problem (even with data) he was labeled a "nut case" because of his insistence on hand-washing. The physicians of the day just couldn’t accept that they had been killing their patients because of their lack of hand washing. Political pressure dumped the hand washing, the death rate went back up and Semmelweiss went crazy. Having a better way and knowing that changing thinking is hard for people to believe . . . if it was that easy they would have discovered it by now. Thus, the "Semmelweiss Syndrome" that I am coining right here in this blog.
