Organisational inefficiency
Everyone knows that there is no organisation in the world that is 100% efficient meaning all business process moves without a flaw, IT systems are always working as expected, people never makes mistakes and analysis of the business operations is always spot on.
Let me tell you a story, I just spoke to a call centre regarding a telecommunication product I have. I told them I would like to downgrade the plan to something more light weight in the new billing month. They said I can’t do it because that plan that I asked for is only available for new customers (it was not listed on the website and I think its dumb but if its the business process they would like to take, so be it). So after a short “discussion” we hung up. I went online to customer self service and saw the plan there AVAILABLE for me to downgrade. So I happily downgraded. All good, I get what I want.
This is a story of inefficiency. Either ways, this company made a mistake. Either the call centre staff was not informed that customer CAN downgrade to the plan now or the self service site is not updated.
There is no solution to such kinds of problems. If its not this scenario, there will be something else. Organisations must try to reduce any forms of inefficiency and communication problems. The above story is an example that humans are not aligned to the system (or vice versa). There are some areas of interest in organisations which should be addressed:
Information management
Organisations deals with mountain loads of data and to make sense of the data in a report is hard enough. Getting data extracted, transferred and loaded (ETL) into your data warehouse can be a nightmare in itself. Designing whatever reports required by each business department and teams can be another issue. Getting it out in time is another issue. So after all these steps, you still need to analyse it and make sense out of it – this is simply not a simple task! Information management must be done well so that management could see that “Oh that plan should not be there for people to downgrade to”
Collaboration and communication
Enterprise 2.0 aims to solve this problem. However, for someone to actually listen, accept and execute an instruction, its not as easy as just posting a piece of information online. Managers would need to promote it, send information out to people, make sure they understand and move on. There is no easy way out. Call centre staff needs to be told “Hey, from now on, people can downgrade their plan to the other plan!” and they have to acknowledge the information. If you argue that people should be RSS-ed / emailed the information and they take action from there, well in the perfect world, it will work that way but not on the imperfect earth.
P.S. Half of this is ranting my frustration about the error. Forgive me.
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