The smile is contagious.
One ring, and the customer service representative comes running.
Excellence starts with the first ring! ;-)
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
The smile is contagious.
One ring, and the customer service representative comes running.
Excellence starts with the first ring! ;-)
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Service With A Smile
When they line up like this, they look especially friendly and cute.
Also, looks like some happy customers, indeed.
Starbucks may not have the world's absolutely best coffee, but their branding is really awesome! ;-)
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Starbucks Face-Branded Packaging
Now Dat's Customer Service
Start With Yes
Don't make me get through no to get to yes.
Keep a smile on your face and your focus on the customer; everything else takes care of itself.
The customer is in the water. They want the yacht. But I can give them a boat. It gets them to where they want to go, and they no longer need to swim. We can work our way up to a yacht.
Say YES!
"Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this. While I deeply regret this situation arose [not that he regrets that they oversold seats and then beat the sh*t of this passenger], I also emphatically stand behind all of you, and I want to commend you for continuing to do above and beyond to ensure we fly right [this is what he "commends" and consider going "above and beyond" and doing what's "right"--what a complete moral disgrace!]."
DISGRACEFUL United Airlines
What Is The World Coming To?
Talk To The Hand
Murderous Customer Service
When Requirements Go Awry
For many years, we have witnessed the failures of excessively product-driven management, where companies focus on the development and sales of products (from automobiles to toaster ovens) to their customers—whether the customers really want those products or not. This was epitomized by the “build it and they will come” mentality.
Numerous companies faltered in this over-the-top product mindset, because they were focused not on satisfying their customer’s needs, but on selling their wares. Think GM versus Toyota or the Days Inn versus The Four Seasons.
Now however, organizations are moving from product- to customer-focused management, with the basic premise that organizations need to engage with their customers and assist them in getting the most value out of whatever products meet their requirements best. In the world of IT, this is the essence of user-centric enterprise architecture, which I created and have been advocating for a number of years.
Harvard Business Review, in January-February 2010, has an article titled “Rethinking Marketing” that asserts that “to compete, companies must shift from pushing individual products to building long-term customer relationships.”
· Product-driven companies—“depend on product managers and one-way mass marketing to push a product to many customers.”
· Customer-driven companies—“engage individual customers…in two-way communications, building long-term relationships.”
The old way of doing business was to focus on the products that the company had to offer and “move inventory” as quickly and profitably as possible. I remember hearing the sales managers yelling: “sell-sell-sell”—even if it’s the proverbial Brooklyn Bridge. And the driver of course, was to earn profits to meet quarterly targets and thereby get bigger bonuses and stock options. We saw where that got us with this last recession.
The new way of doing business is to focus on the customer and their needs, and not any particular product. The customer-driven business aligns itself and it’s products with the needs of its customers and builds a long-term profitable relationship.
“In a sense, the role of customer manager is the ultimate expression of marketing find out what the customer wants and fulfill the need), while the product manager is more aligned with the traditional selling mind-set (have product, find customer).”
The new model for a customer-driven enterprise is the epitome of what social computing and Web 2.0 is really all about. In the move from Web 1.0 to 2.0, we transformed from pushing information to stakeholders to having a lively dialogue with them using various social media tools (like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, discussion boards, and many more)—where customers and others can say what they really think and feel. Similarly, we are now moving from pushing products to actively engaging with our customers so as to genuinely understand and address their needs with whatever solutions are best for them.
In a customer-focused organization, “the traditional marketing department must be reconfigured as a customer department [headed by a chief customer officer] that puts building customer relationships ahead of pushing specific products.”
I think that the new organizational architecture of customer-driven management is superior to a product-focused one, just as a emphasis on people is more potent that a focus on things.
Similar to customer-driven management, in User-centric enterprise architecture, we transform from developing useless “artifacts” to push out from the ivory tower to instead create valuable information products based on the IT governance needs of our customers.
Further, by implementing a customer-focus in information technology management, we can create similar benefits where we are not just pushing the technology of the day at people, but are rather working side-by-side with them to develop the best solutions for the business that there is.
Customer-driven IT Management
IT Leaders are often worried (almost exclusively) about the technology—Is it reliable? Is it robust? Is secure? Is it state-of-the-art? Is it cost-effective? And more.
This is what typically keeps IT management up at night—a server outage, the network being down, an application not available, a project off track, or a security issue such as a virus or worm.
While much lip service has been paid to the statement that “people are our most important asset;” in reality, too little emphasis is generally placed here—i.e. people are not kept high on the IT leadership agenda (for long, if at all), technology is.
Hence, we have seen the negative effects of outsourcing, layoffs, cut training budgets, pay and incentive stagnation, and other morale busting actions on our workforce, along with customers who have been disappointed by magnificent IT project failure rates—with projects over cost, behind schedule, and not meeting customer spec.
Our people—employees and customers—are not being properly cared for and the result is IT projects failure all around us (the stats speak for themselves!).
In essence, we have lost the connection between the technology outcomes we desire and the people who make it happen. Because what drives successful technology solutions are people—knowledgeable, skilled, well trained, and passionate people—working collaboratively together on behalf the mission of the organization.
A book review in ComputerWorld (21 December 2009) on World Class IT by Peter A. High identifies the 5 elements of IT leadership, as follows:
1. Recruit, train, and retain world-class IT people.
2. Build and maintain a robust IT infrastructure.
3. Mange projects and portfolios effectively.
4. Ensure partnerships within the IT department and with the business.
5. Develop a collaborative relationship with external partners.
Interestingly enough, while IT leaders generally are focused on the technology, information technology is not #1 of the 5 elements of IT leadership, but rather employees are—they are identified at the top of the list—and the author states that CIO's should tackle these issues in the order presented.
Further, of the 5 key IT leadership elements, fully 3—or 60% are all about people and relationships, not technology. #1 are employees, #4 is business-IT partnership (customers), and #5 is external collaboration or outreach.
So unfortunately for our organizations, people are the all too forgotten (or neglected) 60%.
I do want to note that I do not fully agree on the order presented by Mr. High; in particular I do not think the customer should be 4th on the list, but rather as the customer represents the mission and the requirements to carry it out, the customer should be unquestionably to me at the very top of the list of IT leadership focus—always. We are here to serve them, period.
Overall though, the key point is that IT leaders need to reorient themselves to people and not overemphasize the technology itself, because if they generally respect and take care of the people and the relationships, the technology will follow and be more successful then ever.
The Forgotten 60%
Being in a technical field like IT, we often see disconnects between the “techies” and the business people—almost like they are speaking foreign languages at each other. The result is that the techies don’t really understand the business requirements and the business people don’t understand the technical solutions. It’s sort of comical to watch, if not for being so sad in terms of the huge number of failed IT projects that result.
One thing we’ve realized is that we need to be able to communicate and communicate well between the business and IT or else we are not going to be very effective at IT service provision and enabling the business to perform at its best.
One solution has been to have IT staff whose job it is to translate between the business and IT units—these people are in roles at times called “business liaisons” or IT-business relationship managers. It is helpful to assign these liaisons to each business unit and give them authority and accountability for managing and nurturing a healthy relationship and unambiguous communication between business units and IT providers. The liaisons “own the customer” and ensure that requirements are captured correctly and understood by IT, that the proposed IT solutions are clearly explained to the business, and that the customer is satisfied with the systems and services they are receiving.
A second solution is hire IT communications specialists who more broadly “market” and communicate IT plans, policies, processes, goals, objectives, initiatives, milestones, and performance. I have found these professionals to be indispensable to “getting the message out there” and enhancing awareness and understanding for IT in the organization. Of course, IT leaders play a critical role in developing and honing the actual message, and in delivering ongoing two-way communications throughout the organization. In essence, they are the ambassadors and communicators par excellence inside and outside the organization with all IT stakeholders.
In short, IT needs to communicate early and often and communicate, communicate, communicate.
ComputerWorld, August 31-September 7, 2009 has a wonderful article affirming the criticality of IT communications in an article entitled: “Marketing IT: An Inside Job” by Mary Brandel.
As Brandel states: “It’s not about hype. It’s about conveying IT’s value.” I would add that it’s not only about conveying IT’s value, but also about creating IT value, by improving the two-way communication between the business and IT and thereby generating more effective solutions.
The article provides a number of useful suggestions for marketing and communicating IT that I’ve adapted, such as customer satisfaction surveys; IT annual reports that communicates accomplishments, alignment to strategic plan, “resources saved, awards won, and conferences at which staff members have spoken;” e-Brochures with “video coverage explaining goals,” services, policies, and plans; and Twitter alerts on service outages.
The key though which Bandel points out is that IT leaders need to “embed a 24/7 marketing mindset throughout the [IT] organization.” While business liaisons and IT communications specialists are focused on and specialize in this, it is still imperative for everyone in the IT organization to understand and be able to market and communicate IT services and processes to customers. All IT personnel are representatives to the business and should present and represent that customer service is our #1 goal.
From my perspective, this means transitioning our IT organizations to be wholly user-centric. This means a clear and ever present awareness that the business is IT’s raison d’être.
IT Communications, A Must Have
Punlished at Government Technology
[Editor's Note: This article is the second in a series that explores the CIO Support Services Framework in government.]
In Part 1 of The CIO Support Services Framework, I presented the six major components needed to support the public CIO in managing IT strategically and proactively. In this article, I will explain what IT best practices framework inform these six components and propose a structure for implementing it.
The six CIO Support Services Framework (CSSF) functions are distinct areas that require subject-matter expertise and need to be managed based on the various IT best practice frameworks. While I am not endorsing any particular best practice government or industry framework, below is a sampling according to CSSF functional area:
Enterprise Architecture (EA) -- Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF), and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF).
Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) -- Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130--"Management of Federal Information Resources" and the Control Objectives for Information and related Technologies (COBIT) by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) and the IT Governance Institute (ITGI).
Project Management Office (PMO) -- the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) by the Project Management Institute is the de facto standard project management best practices from initiation through project closeout.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) -- the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) by the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and International Standards Organization (ISO) 20000--"IT Service Management." While both are very much operational frameworks, they can also be used to guide service and support at a strategic level in the OCIO.
IT Security (ITS) -- the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), various Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) from the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), and International Organization for Standardization ISO/IEC 17799 -- Information Technology Code of Practice for Information Security Management.
Business Performance Measurement (BPM) -- the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) by Kaplan and Norton from Harvard Business School -- examines financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth measures for the organization.
Although each of the six main functional areas and their supporting best practice frameworks are unique, they can and will overlap, and it is imperative that the OCIO develop a simple and streamlined process for managing these, so that IT and business personnel are not confused or burdened by redundant or circuitous IT processes that hinder, rather than spur innovation and agility. For example, while EA planning guides CPIC IT investment decisions, those decisions inform the next round of EA planning -- it is inherently cyclical. Nevertheless, we must ensure that the overall process flow between all six areas is as clear and simple as possible.
I like to use the example of a Monopoly game board as an analogy for how IT processes should ideally progress from "Go" all the way through -- logically, and more or less sequentially -- without project mishap, ending up on the OMB Watch List for risky IT projects, the equivalent of landing in Monopoly "jail."
The CSSF provides the functional resources to fully support the OCIO and provide the capability to move from simply fighting day-to-day operational problems to strategically managing IT service provision, improving performance and increasing program and project success, through:
Planning (EA)
Investing (CPIC)
Executing (PMO)
Servicing (CRM)
Securing (ITS)
Measuring (BPM)
Each of these OCIO component functions is helpful in managing IT by providing the CIO the capability to better plan, invest, execute, service, secure and measure -- but these are not stand-alone functions -- they are all necessary and complementary.
An organization can have the best EA plan, but without the structured investment processes of CPIC, the plan will not drive, guide, influence and shape IT investment decision-making. In fact, I would propose that CPIC is an enforcement mechanism for carrying out the EA plan.
Similarly the organization can have a wonderful CPIC process for making IT investment decisions, but without a PMO to develop and enforce sound PM policies and practices, IT projects will continue to fail miserably. With an effective PMO, we will have more successful project execution, but without CRM to manage customer requirements and service and support issues, we run a very high risk of rolling out IT capabilities that the customer neither wants nor is happy with. Further, CRM will increase customer satisfaction, but without ITS, CIOs will not ensure the security of the information and systems that the users are depending on.
Finally, with ITS, CIOs will provide users for information security, but without BPM, will miss the opportunity to perform structured performance measurement and management, so that the CIO has visibility to how IT is performing in all areas and on an ongoing basis and can take timely corrective action as needed.
The result is that the CIO is better supported, without being overwhelmed, and the CTO has a clear mandate for strategically implementing the CIO's vision for the organization.
Of course, one of the biggest challenges to implementing the CSSF is finding and allocating the needed funding to support these OCIO functions. IT operations tend to be underfunded already and stuck in the perpetual firefighting mode. Executives often fearf siphoning the needed money or people away from the short-term firefight to work on long-term strategy and implementation. This is a serious mistake!
Firefighting is a losing battle if you attack only the symptoms, but never address the cause or core strategic issues. Moreover, in the fast-paced technology environment of the 21st century, no IT leader can afford to be looking backward -- managing legacy systems that do not leverage modern technologies, techniques and methodologies for information sharing, collaboration and business intelligence.
If you are spending close to 100 percent on IT operations today, is it really unreasonable to allocate 3 to 5 percent of this to strategy, planning and control? Of course, this needs to adjust when IT budgets get extremely large or small and as the complexity of the organization shifts.
As the prior chief enterprise architect of the U.S. Coast Guard and of the United States Secret Service, I have always been a deep proponent of EA and CPIC to drive better IT investment decision-making. However, now as the chief technology officer (CTO) of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, I more fully understand how the CSSF functions and interplay are needed for the CIO to perform effectively.
Clearly EA and CPIC are not enough to adequately support the CIO's needs, and thus, they need to be extended with PMO, CRM, ITS and BPM. Moreover, these areas function best that function together for the reasons I mentioned prior -- it's a clear domino effect, where astute planning, sound governance, skilled project management practices, competent customer service, solid IT security and meaningful performance measurement are all necessary for the CIO to manage IT more strategically and effectively.??This is why I firmly believe that the CIO Support Services Framework is how we are going to have to manage IT to achieve genuine success for the CIO in the 21st century and beyond.
_______________________________________
Andy Blumenthal is chief technology officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A regular speaker and published author, Blumenthal blogs at User-Centric Enterprise Architecture and The Total CIO. These are his personal views and do not represent those of his agency.
How to Strengthen the Office of the CIO - Part II
How to Strengthen the Office of the CIO - Part I
CIO Support Services Framework
For a CIO, leadership can be even more challenging because of the balance needed between the business and technical aspects of job and the need to communicate to those two communities in their respective languages and to be able to translate between them. Often, sitting in meetings I see the best intentioned IT folks often talking techie “right past” their business counterparts and the business folks discussing mission to IT people who may never have been outside the confines of the IT environment.
As the CIO, it’s key to bridge the divide and help the business and IT communities in the organization work together and learn to speak and understand each other. Only this way, can the IT folks understand the business requirements and the business folks understand the technical solutions being proposed.
To accomplish this, the CIO should have the business and IT people work together in integrated project teams (IPT’s), tiger teams, task forces, and so on to accomplish IT projects, rather than the business just being consulted at the beginning of the project on the requirements, and handed a “this is what we thought you wanted” deliverable at the end.
Further, the CIO should appoint business liaisons or customer relationship managers to routinely work with the business, understand their needs and work to address them—until completion and satisfaction. The business liaisons need to “own the customer” and should not just be a pass-through to the help desk with no follow up, closure, or performance measurement
Where appropriate, I think it is even a good idea to collocate the business and IT people together, rather than in their separate fiefdoms and functional silos to so they really become a cohesive team—sharing business and IT knowledge and working together to implement an IT enabled business.
Of course, the CIO should encourage training, field trips, work details, and other cross-pollinating initiatives.
Finally, a robust enterprise architecture and IT governance helps to effectively bring the business and IT people together to jointly build the plan and make the decisions, so that it is not one side or the other working in a vacuum or imposing little understood requirements or solutions on the other.
In the book, The New CIO Leader by Boardbent and Kitzis, one of the basic premises is that “every CIO will follow one of two paths:” as follows:
--either they will be a “chief technology mechanic,” narrowly focused on IT to the exclusion of the business.
- or they will be a “new CIO leader,” where “IT is at the heart of every significant business process and is crucial to innovation and enterprise success.”
To be the new CIO leader, and truly integrate IT into the very fabric of the mission, you need to “weave business and IT strategy together” and also integrate the business and IT people to work effectively together.
Of course, this starts with building a high-performing IT organization, but must also involve regularly reaching out to the business at every opportunity and including them as full partners in build effective and efficient enterprise architecture planning, IT governance, and full systems life cycle execution.
In my opinion, the new CIO leader, does not think just IT, but lives and breathes the business and does everything in their power to bring the two not just in alignment, but in true partnership.
How important is this?
As Broadbent and Kitzis state: “If you don’t think like a constantly ‘re-new-ing’ CIO, you may be on our way to becoming an ex-CIO.
Bridging the Business and IT Divide
Too often CIOs see themselves very literally as managing IT. What they need to do is manage risk along with all of the other key leadership issues such as innovation, information-sharing, collaboration, and so on.
Context
The IT environment today is part of a larger social, political, and economic context that is more fraught with risk than ever. The mortgage meltdown, the financial crisis, job losses, volatility in commodity prices (e.g. oil), and so much more—it seems like it will never end. I would add that recently we had birds collide with an airline in NY, satellites that collided in space, and submarines that collided from France and the U.K. Oh, let’s not forget Russia’s invasion of Georgia and the terrorist attacks in India in November that killed at least 173 and wounded 308 and the Asian Tsunami in 2004 that killed over 225,000 people from 11 countries.
This is scary beyond belief!
Is G-d punishing us, teaching us, ignoring us?
Expectations
Whatever is going on, people are crying out for help--they are praying, and they are also turning to their government for “recovery” (as in the Recovery Act), “bailout” (as in taxpayer bailout), “relief” (as in the Troubled Asset Relief Program). The CIO is operating in an environment in which risk management is increasingly something that the average citizen expects from their leaders (and IT is not immune):
--“Citizens are increasingly calling on government to prevent bad things from happening and to ride in to help when they do.” (Donald Kettl).
--“American want life to be less risky…[and so] without realizing it, federal officials are risk managers at their core.”
--“The public, not only demands that the government manage the consequences of risk, but that it deals with problems before they turn into catastrophes. Merely reacting to risk is eroding the people’s trust in government.”
Challenges
While risk management is clearly a critical need, it is also more difficult than ever, for the following reasons:
--Pace and impact—“the problem now is the rapid pace of the challenges—that whatever it is that happens punishes and punishes instantly.”
--Scope—“’we obviously don’t want to get to a state where the government is running everything.’ But with no clear definition of the limit, the number of public risks the government should manage appears endless.”
In my opinion, cost is a huge factor as well. Just the financial crisis so far has cost us trillions of dollars and added to our debt probably for generations to come, and at a time when we are already on the brink with unfunded social security and Medicare liabilities for the baby boomers that are quickly nearing retirement and is feared will overwhelm the system. How much more financial burden can the system take before there are dire consequences?
Framework
There are no easy answers to these trying times or to how we manage the incredible risk that we seem to face virtually every day. However, there are three common approaches to risk management set forth by Moss:
--Reduce it (or eliminate it, if possible)
--Spread it
--Shift it
We often reduce risk, by having a backup plan (such as in IT having backup and recovery), and we mitigate risk by spreading or shifting it (such as through insurance policies or government social programs, and so forth).
6 Tools for CIOs
These lessons in risk management are critical to professionals in information technology, a field that is always in rapid transition with changing products, skill sets, and practices and where the scope of IT impacts almost everything we do (from online finance, health IT, e-commerce, robotics, and more). And where the price of keeping up with Jones in technology is does not come cheap to any organization these days.
In IT, where more than half of projects are over budget or behind schedule and many end up cancelled all together, we need to manage project risk. Here is a suggested toolkit for CIOs to do so:
--First, we need an architecture plan to ensure that we are aligning to business requirements and complying with technical requirements. This helps reduce the risk that we are doing IT the “wrong” way.
--Second we need to have sound IT governance to manage the selection of our investments, the control of cost, schedule, and performance, and the evaluation for lessons for the future. This helps reduce and spread the risk that we are doing the “wrong” IT investments.
--Third, we need solid project management to guide projects from initiation through close out in a defined, repeatable, and measureable way. This helps reduce the risk that we doing projects the “wrong” way.
--Fourth, we need robust IT security that protects our data from manipulation, interception, interjection, or other malice. This helps reduce and spread the risk of our IT working “wrong”.
--Fifth, we need adept customer relationship management so that we are fully engaged with our customers in building solutions that meet their needs and solves their business problems. This helps spread and shift the risk that we are managing our IT customers the “wrong” way.
--And sixth, and not least, we need to focus on our human capital to ensure they have the leadership, motivation, tools, and training to perform at their peak. This helps reduce and spread the risk of human error.
Together, these six CIO tools are the keys to the kingdom when it comes to managing IT risk and we can never take risk management for granted.
6 CIO Tools for Managing IT Risk
There is a better way to showing customer love than inundating them with marketing and communications that are not coordinated, not focused, redundant, inconsistent, and not cost-effective.
This is the case of many organizations that have multiple, decentralized, lines of business (LOB) that have their own revenue and profitability targets. Typically LOBs, branches, and call centers solicit customers and their business independently, with distinct marketing campaigns, promotional offers, and customer surveys.
What’s the way to improve our customer interactions?
Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is “a planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time.” (American Marketing Association)
In DM Review, May 2008, Lisa Loftis provides us a vision of IMC utopia, where customer contact are coordinated, targeted, is helpful to the customer, and profitable to the firm:
“Imagine being able to coordinate and prioritize your entire program of promotions and communications across all customer touchpoints. You could eliminate conflicting offers across channels. You could stop inundating you bet customers with multiple marketing campaigns, You could deliver a seamless dialog with customers where every interaction is relevant to the customer, delivered at exactly the right time and satisfies a significant customer needs. In this universe, the very act of communicating with your customer fosters a positive experience, facilitates trust and expands the relationship.”
Why is IMC important?
“Timely, relevant communications go a long way toward increasing satisfaction, and there is no question that satisfied customers add to the bottom line.”
How is IMC related to User-centric Enterprise Architecture?
User-centric EA relies on IMC to make the architecture end-users experience more satisfying and beneficial to them and thus more valuable to the organization’s decision making. As opposed to traditional EA that often is user/customer blind and develops esoteric and convoluted “artifacts”, User-centric EA seeks to provide end-users with IMC-style information products based on relevant information that is easy to understand and readily available.
What are the enterprise technical solutions that need to be architected in order to build the overall organizational IMC capability?
In the end, developing true IMC capabilities involves moving the organization towards a more centralized model of asset management. That does not mean losing your agility and nimbleness in the marketplace in terms of strategy and decision making, but rather using your consolidated organizational assets (such as data warehouses and business intelligence, CRM systems, and the breadth of depth of your product offerings) to your advantage. You want a unified brand and voice when talking with the customer.
Integrated Marketing Communications and Enterprise Architecture