Jotting Number 78, by Joe Podolsky:
From: joe_podolsky@hp.com
Date: May 14, 1998
Subject: The Expectation Firewall is Gone
Here's a brilliant statement: the IT world is going through yet one more revolution. As I see it, the previous disruptions were around the simple size of hardware. We went from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers. Along with that, our information systems architectures went from central to tiered to distributed. Networks are also part of the story. Our network architectures went from star configurations to hierarchical designs of increasing complexity as we moved from enterprise computing to departmental computing to client server constructs.
And now we have the Web. It's the convergence of lots of bits and increasing bandwidth. It's the fruition of open systems. Artificial boundaries are falling, and we are all delightfully connected, creating in parallel both fortunes for vendors and frustrations for users. Such has always been the case with revolutions.
In the May 11, 1998 issue of Fortune, columnist Stewart Alsop felt that the Web has become sufficiently mature that he could offer insight by rating some of the sites he uses by comparing their response to one simple transaction. He recently moved, so he wanted to change his address.
He awards his highest rating, "CyberNirvana," to those vendors who were easy to work with on-line and who remembered information once he entered it. This doesn't seem like rocket science, but he awarded his CN rating only to two sites, the US Postal Service (!) and Amazon.Com.
Alsop's next offers a "CyberPretender" rating to those organizations that say they are Web enabled but aren't. He mainly flames the various United Airline sites which are, at best, "digital brochures." To really do anything, you still have to call their 800 number. He also doesn't think much of Shell Oil's credit card operation nor of the California State Automobile Association, both of which have Web sites but neither of which would let him change his address on-line.
His lowest rating is the not-coveted "CyberClueless" designation. He observes that Lucky Food Stores can recognize him at the cash register thanks to a plastic identification card that automatically gives him various discounts, but they don't even have a Web site that would help him change his address much less let him see summaries of his purchases. Even The Wall St. Journal, which has a fine Web site, wouldn't change his address without him finding and entering the account code from his mailing label.
So, the question is: How do you think that your customers would rate the various Web sites that you are responsible for?
A year ago, this would have been a silly question. We all were clueless. We were still worried about internal desktop support, or, for us more advanced types, we were focussing on point-to-point electronic data interchange connections with the outside world. Now, the bar has been raised, and some columnist, representing the vast public, says that our minimum acceptable performance is at least to easily handle changes of address on-line. I've not tried, but I'll bet that most HP Web sites would fail that test.
All this, of course, sets the level of expectation for our internal customers as well. They also read articles like this and raise the bar. They ("we") have a hard time understanding why we still have to repeatedly enter arcane codes into batch information systems we use every day when we can be real people to outside vendors we visit only occasionally.
It's not only a question of efficiency; it's a question of self-esteem. We like it when our computers recognize us.
Sidebar: recently I had to reconfigure my personal computer, and I temporarily lost track of my "cookies." Cookies in Web-speak, as some you may know, are not the peanut butter kind (my favorite) but are those bits of information that Web vendors leave on your computer so that they know about you. It's an ultimate form of a distributed customer information database. For example, when I log on to Amazon.Com, it looks up the cookie it left on my computer when I first signed on to Amazon and immediately knows who I am so it can find (on its computers) my address without my having to reenter it each time I order. Anyway, without my cookies, I was cyber-shunned. I was there, but the cyberworld didn't recognize me. None of the sites I used before knew who I was. When I finally restored my cookies to their appropriate file, I felt like I had been reinstated into the world of the technoprivileged.
It's a matter of expectations, and the Web is changing those expectations as much in the internal IT marketplace as in the outside world.
In the internal IT world, we set expectations by annual "contracts," often called service level agreements (SLAs). We have help desks to call when we're confused, and we have account managers who work with us as things change. We build into those SLAs certain assumptions of benefits and costs and try to monitor them as the real world tests those assumptions. The execution of adequate, much less delightful, internal IT service management is tough to do, especially in organizations that are large, have diverse needs, and are geographically distributed.
But somehow I have the feeling that we're sweating over the care and feeding of locomotives and roundhouses and ignoring those noisy, little, only-black model-T's that are hiccuping along the local horse paths. SLAs, account managers, and help desks are artifacts of orderly, hierarchical organizations; where there are separate and identifiable sellers and buyers; where things stay put for months, if not years; where expectations are set within the context of the internal agreements, not to be changed by the glitter of hungry vendors hawking books and clothes and toys in an on-line electronic bazaar.
Revolutions most often pit ragtag commonfolk against the established structure. So it is today with the Electronic-World. Expectations are set and served in real time and the IT service business models we use with our internal customers are under guerilla attack.
The Web is erasing the firewall between internal and external customers. If we aspire to CyberNirvana for our external customers, how can we CyberClueless internally?
Regards,
Joe