IT Directions

Are you responsible for, or just caught up in, organizational improvement initiatives?  If so, it’s as well to realize that helping your organization increase its efficiency does not always have the effect intended.

The well-established law of business known as Pareto’s rule tells us that 20% of the work gives rise to 80% of the costs.  Typically this part of the work is the part least susceptible to automation.  In other words, your bit.  What happens when your company realizes that most of its costs are on salaries such as yours?

But no, you may say - people such as myself are the life-blood of the organization.  My employer would not be so foolish as to dispense with the valuable work carried out by highly-skilled individuals such as myself.

It would be nice to think so.  However, despite the BPR fiasco of the 1990s when exactly this kind of thing did happen on a large scale, the current trend towards outsourcing of everything possible is leading to what will probably be an equally disastrous re-run.  Perhaps you will be one of the lucky ones who gets to come back on an inflated consultant’s rate when the dust has settled!  Perhaps you won’t.  But it would make a lot more sense for everyone concerned to deal with things more thoughtfully this time round.

The underlying problem here is actually very simple.  People even at a senior level in organizations have a poor understanding of what it is that their staff actually do.  They form a simplistic concept of what their staff are up to, and then think: if this is all there is to it, why not get someone on the other side of the world to do it cheaper?

The perspective underpinning such decisions is that work can be defined as a series of tasks.  This task-oriented outlook arises from traditional management tools such as work breakdown structures in project planning, and is supported by mainstream technologies such as workflow and BPM.  In such approaches:

1. Work is divided up into tasks
2. These task units are assumed to capture what is done.

This is fair enough when the work consists of assembling cars on a production line, or matching bank statements to receivables.  However, the approach breaks down completely when it comes to what I call human-driven work - the sort of collaborative, adaptive, knowledge-based work that you and your colleagues do.

Treating work as task-oriented is equivalent to viewing it from the outside - as a detached observer, individual tasks are all that you see.  However, this is completely inadequate for human-driven work, which must be understood from the inside.  Your own work is not about tasks at all.  It is about things such as information, interaction and innovation - much of which is almost invisible to an observer.  Only by understanding work from the inside can you make valid judgements about it - such as how genuinely to do it better.

TAKE AWAY

How far down the outsourcing route is your organization already?  Where will it stop?

Even though ignorance of the true value of human-driven work was the direct cause of large-scale losses during the BPR fad of the early 1990s, it is all happening again.  In fact, those most concerned about it are the outsourcing companies themselves - the suppliers, not the customers.  They may be making a packet at the moment, but know there is huge trouble ahead when their clients start to realize what they have let themselves in for.

So, in an effort to stave off the coming backlash, the outsourcers are actually in the vanguard of efforts to better understand human work.  Many of them are already looking to the techniques of Human Interaction Management to get a better handle on what highly-skilled people actually do.

However, ultimately it is the responsibility of each organization to get properly to grips with what they want to outsource, and how.  The old notion of "core" processes has been discredited for a long time, with Hewlett-Packard outsourcing printer design, and banks everywhere outsourcing financial transaction handling.  So when will you come to understand what the highly-skilled people in your organization contribute - before or after it makes them (quite possibly including you) redundant?

This is the 4th post in a blog series on implementing "distributed" people-oriented business processes - collaborative human work that is carried out in more than one location, involving more than one organization.  As discussed previously, though much (perhaps most) activity carried out in the modern workplace is of this type, and it is becoming the main competitive differentiator in business, such activity is only poorly supported by current IT technology.  This blog series outlines a way forward.

This time I will try and illustrate the proposed approach - process-based tools that are hosted on clients rather than on centralized servers - by means of an example.  And as so often happens, the perfect example dropped into my lap only recently.

Have you ever been driven into a perfect storm of rage by customer "service" from a supplier?  I try to take the long view and stay calm in most situations, but got pretty close to the edge when trying to sort out my personal broadband service during the last few days.  Over a year ago, I signed up for what was, at the time, in the UK, a fast business-grade connection, from the supplier I have used for well over a decade now.  The 12 month lock-in on the contract is now over - and since the company is currently offering a price of about half what I agreed to pay originally, I tried to contact them to sort the matter out.  This is where matters went horribly wrong, the only silver lining (to my raised blood pressure) being that the story is usefully instructive for our purposes here.

As background, the company concerned was one of the first UK ISPs.  In its early days, 1992 onwards, it was a very friendly, knowledgeable outfit with a technically-literate customer base.  The company managed its growth well, and grew rapidly, to the point where at one stage 2% of UK phone calls were to its dial-up service.  Then, after 6 years, they were bought out.  And everything changed.  In particular, the customer service effectively vanished overnight.

Before takeover, even at the height of their popularity, you used to ring their office building in suburban London, and speak to a permanent employee.  It was not unusual to speak to the same person on multiple occasions, and the person you spoke to would be the one that dealt with your case.  Now, if you email them or use their Web site to submit a support request, you are lucky if you get an automated acknowledgement, and even that won’t be for a while.  If you dare to ring, on the other hand, you get forwarded from one person to another in a never-ending chain - 6 is not unusual, often not even being transferred, but having to hang up and redial - and at each stage, you must repeat your name, confirm your identity via a sequence of questions, then explain your situation all over again.  At the end of going through this sequence 3 times, all I got each time was a promise of a callback.  And none of these callbacks ever materialized.

What is the root cause of this appalling behaviour?

If we compare the current situation to the early days of this company, and make an analogy with computer systems, at the start a customer like me had what we can think of as a "channel" to the supplier (like a persistent open socket, if you are technically minded).  I could ring them, and know who I was contacting - even where the person was located. This was long before the days of calls being recorded, but the person I spoke to would take responsibility for sorting the matter out, would ring me back once they had done so, and - crucially - if I then got further problems, I could ring the person concerned on their direct line.  I never had to re-explain anything, and always knew exactly how to contact them if necessary.

Effectively, customer and supplier built and shared a "process context" - a mini-workspace, in which lived certain data and activities.  Data included my account details and any problems or issues I was facing, along with any relevant information provided by the supplier.  Activities included efforts on my side to supply additional information or carry out tests, and on their side to sort things out in various ways.

All this was accomplished informally, of course.  They may have used some kind of CRM system, but if so, I was never aware of it in any way.  What I was aware of, to my delight as a satisfied customer, was that we knew each other - "knew" in the very specific sense of understanding that we were engaged in a collaboration, and of what that collaboration consisted.  We were participants in a shared process, participants who had signed up to be involved, had agreed on the nature of the process in question, and each did their bit to ensure the process was carried out successfully.

TAKE AWAY

The functionality required to provide effective customer support is very different from CRM.  Some CRM systems may include the ability to document specific issues raised by a customer, and the actions taken on both sides, but such systems offer no ongoing means to manage that process.  And current Business Process Management or workflow products do not provide sufficient flexibility to support the full range of issues raised by customers, which are generally a highly individual concoction of requirements and problems.

The problem with CRM, BPM, et al is that they assume both customer and supplier will fit naturally into the limited range of functions offered by a pre-configured server system.  And this is so far from business reality that it is almost laughable.  In fact, the true nature of customer service is more like this:

1. Customer (or sometimes supplier) opens a negotiation - on a number of topics, which may or may not be related.
2. Supplier and customer exchange information, and agree next actions to be carried out - all this being highly customized to the case in question.
3. Step 2 is repeated until both parties are satisfied.

What sort of software is required to support this behaviour?  Software that lets both parties define multi-party contracts, replete with custom data items and activities, and each keep a copy of that contract on their own system (since both parties will naturally want a record of the agreement).  Further, the software objects embodying this contract must act not only as a "system of record" but also support active engagement in the collaborative process thus defined - as well as the continual re-negotiation of this process.

It is easy to see that current Web technology does not work anything at all like this - saving or printing a page from a supplier’s support Web site, for example, offers nothing like the functionality described above.  What is required is a "rich client" capable of defining, depicting, enacting and revising such collaborative contracts - a client that all parties to a process use to support the work involved.  My own efforts to provide free software of this form are surely only the start of a new wave in technology for customer service.  And for many other fields too.

In the next instalments of this series, I will look at further applications and examples of this approach to collaborative work support.  Stay tuned if you want to see what is round the corner.

And I have changed my broadband supplier, by the way.