Customer channels and user experience

In many of the places I work there is the concept of a customer access channel. That is - an interface by which a customer is able to interact with the business. For example - face to face in store, on the phone to a call centre, online web-page etc.
These have been extended to multi-channel and even omni-channel strategies where customers get similar or complementary experiences through all different mechanisms.
The idea being, of course Customer Focus (with capitals) and all the good things that come with it.

The trouble is that the entire focus is still on a discrete set of closely controlled access points. Most of which are conceived and built around a particular technology. But if we decompose this viewpoint you can see that there are overlaps in the technologies available - and generally they relate to the capabilities that may be offered, whatever the technology.
Hence - assisted channels, that is phone or store-front where you talk to a real person, have an experienced (sort of) user in front of the technology, and this allows for a much more complex (richer) customer experience. At the other end of the scale is voice systems talking to a machine, however well programmed, is restricted to a single set of menus and very simple operations. The overlap comes into things like using cash - which is restricted to store-front or self-serve kiosk (e.g. an ATM). Even through web channels the user experience on a smart-phone is different to a tablet is different to a laptop is different to a desktop - although many web-sites don't make the distinction.
The security profiles for mobile access, using the device id, cannot be used with a standard computer - especially through a corporate firewall.
A better way of thinking about the customer experience is thus by consideration of the set of capabilities that the access path offers - not by the 'channel', a concept which is becoming less and less well defined.

Working with Large Organisations

As an answer to a small business-man asking what it is like to work within a large company:

 

"I have been thinking about the questions you had about working with large organisations. I have not worked with many *small* companies so please take this with a grain of salt but:

One major concern of ANY organisation of any size at all is holding itself together and keeping people working together. With small groups this is done instinctively through shared goals and constant reinforcement. The larger an enterprise gets the more effort must be given to maintaining itself as an organisation. In the largest global companies the vast majority of the effort is involved in management – which is another way of saying getting individuals to work together.

Hence: they tend to be very conservative about change. There will be a (great) number of processes, procedures, governance etc. – basically red-tape – to ensure everyone does things the same way. All of which is designed to make sure that complexity is reduced, higher ups have good visibility of what is going on through the murk, and no-body is going off on their own.

There is, of course, less of this the higher in the organisation you go until the board is generally able to try new things – except that board members tend to have moved up through the chain and well aware of the balancing act and the need to stay close to the centre.

In summary – you will find it harder to ‘get things done’ the larger the organisation you are working with. You may be able to mitigate if your interest is restricted to a sub-set of the company. A division will operate as if it were a smaller group – but always within the context of the larger processes with regards to things like Procurement, Financials, HR etc. [This could be an issue for your product since an ERP is, by the very nature of it, concerned with the entire enterprise].

The same basic circumstance applied in IT. Any new system will almost certainly require integration with a number of incumbents. The larger the company, the more sub-systems (often more than one doing roughly the same thing – decommissioning anything is difficult) and therefore the greater the integration overhead. This manifests in negotiation and tight specifications, combined testing, shared environments etc. – all of which add significantly to delivery timelines. And costs – which is why the figures I quoted are relatively high compared to the smaller companies you are used to.

As above, the overhead can be mitigated by restricting scope to a single function/capability. Staying highly coherent and loosely coupled (of course this is also good architecture). But make sure you are not overlapping functionality with some strategic system which is carrying out the same work for the company as a whole.

Finally, I should call out the problems that all this poses for Agile development. Trying to tweak a web-site which relies on a mainframe that has an annual release cycle is an exercise in frustration. Full end-to-end testing alone can be a major issue in co-ordination. It is better to decouple through an integration layer and let each piece operate at its own natural pace."

Great minds or great conversations

Eleanor Roosevelt once said: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
As someone who has always had trouble with small talk (doesn't everyone feel that? I don't think I have ever heard anyone say that they were good at it), I understand the sentiment but I feel it may not be quite correct. I am sure that Einstein and Shakespeare both would have discussed trivial matters over a pint or a cuppa at some time.
The implication that great minds do not indulge in such things or that anyone who converses at that level is small-minded is not realistic.
Better would be to say: "Great conversations are about ideas; average discussions are about events; small talk is about people." Pointless chatter about trivial matters can be essential for building rapport and bonding which inevitably leads to larger networks which allow the great conversations to take place.
This shifts the focus from the people to the relationship - and building connections from many small pieces until the larger structures can be supported. Picking the correct mode for the context you are in can be difficult and getting it wrong means that the conversation falls apart, or never gets going. Trying to talk about existentialism in a night-club is an exercise in futility, and probably won't win you any friends.
Of course, if the only thing you *ever* talk about is other people, choosing a mode becomes easy - but does not lead to any really deep conversations.

Corporations and the need for jobs

Some scattered thoughts which may or may not link up:
* One of the big changes in the last half century is the size of corporate bodies. Companies are simply bigger than they were 50 years ago. The growth has been occurring for some time. Where once a company was Matthew and Son with 10s or 100s of workers, now there is McDonalds with nearly 2 million - and a multitude of satellite companies dependent on their operations.
* The larger any group of people gets the more communication paths there are and the more effort is required to hold it together. Indeed the major purpose of any organisation, and most of the effort it expends, is to hold itself together (I did see this quoted somewhere but I can't find it). Administrative overhead grows exponentially. Stricter controls and tighter hierarchy are required to ensure that the costs of size do not overwhelm any economies of scale.
* Fifty years ago, it was believed that automation and technological advances would reduce the need for work and eventually the majority of our time would at leisure, not at work. Somewhere along the way this has changed and working hours are now longer than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution.
* The type of work which is expanding it office and administrative work. Areas such as primary industry and manufacturing have had some growth but the number of people required to achieve the same outcome has dropped dramatically. The one exception is at head office. Many corporate headquarters now employ more people than a small country.
* I have heard it said that the purpose of many of these jobs is to keep people occupied. I think maybe that is one outcome, but the other consequence is that the administrative tasks necessary to hold together such large numbers can now be done. Management is the highest aspiration of many employees and organising other people is the main task that managers do - whether it is actually needed or not. Note that, in general, this is not productive work in that it does not produce anything. It simply allows others to produce.
* In short, the outcome of technological advance (especially in communications technology) has been to allow larger and larger organisations to balance their bloated managements on a smaller and smaller base of actual workers. Not that the base is necessarily small in many cases (see the numbers for McDonalds above) - not compared to the worker base during the peak of unionism half a century (or more) ago. It is just that the productive employees are a smaller percentage of the whole.

I see a great many people working near me in office buildings and I wonder what they are doing all day. How much actually gets done after all the late nights and meetings and proposals and business cases and evaluation and analysis and revisions and documents and status reports and strategies and estimates and decisions and visions and everything? How much is really achieved for all that work? Is it really just a matter of keeping all those people occupied?

Or perhaps I am just feeling jaded

Corporate Morality and cultural alignment

The larger the company the more and tighter the rules that are required to do anything. The stereotypical garage start-up with two people rarely needs permission to try something new. The multinational corporation with 100,000 workers scattered over five continents requires forms (on paper) signed by a senior general manager in advance to someone to take a $10 taxi ride.

The rules and governance are required to make sure everyone knows the correct, acceptable thing to do within the culture of the corporation. The more people involved the harder it is to align standards without externalising them into pre-defined processes. The trouble arises since pre-defined processes are generally applied to trivial and obvious things while the important and ambiguous cannot be so simply prescribed. The solution is therefore to boot the decisions up to the food chain - hence dis-empowering the general staff and ensuring that senior managers, who don't actually care about the matter at hand, are too busy to think about what they are doing.

There is a connection here to social media and the control of the message that your company is putting out. If a company is uncertain about how closely the opinions of its staff align with that of the senior management then they will try to make sure that the staff do not say anything publicly that may embarrass the company. The obvious solution is to make sure that the staff ARE aligned with the company goals - a process that, in management-speak, is called 'employee engagement'. When the disconnect between workers and governed [board level managers can be considered the legislative arm of the company] is small, the friction within the company is reduced and things really get moving. When they are not aligned there is a lot of effort wasted in just keeping things together.
But in general people do not change their opinions very easily and engagement can be difficult. How much easier it would be to align corporate goals with the common morality or ethical stance of the staff. Except where the company government which set the corporate goals have a completely different set of morals to the people doing the work.

One obvious consequence of this view is that the hiring policy should be focused on employing people who's opinions and approach align with the company culture. And indeed this this the approach that is starting to filter into the corporate world, especially by companies such as Google.
There are a couple of issues that immediately come to mind:
1) what happens when the companies expressed aims do not align with the real culture? I would think this *should* be rare but I would not be surprised to find that it is fairly common. After all, corporate governors are as likely as the next person to have an incorrect self-image - and culture will follow actions, not expressed intentions (see Google again).
2) If everyone in a company is the same, it really restricts the creative options available. In the extreme it amounts to having only middle-aged married white men on the board. There is a single, constantly re-enforced, point of view which leads to a massive corporate myopia.

Cargo Cult Management

Actually observing the management style of some of the people I have worked for recently brought to mind the idea of Cargo Cult Management - which I think I'll coin (if no-one has already done so before me).
This is management by the book: saying the right thing ("thanks for that valuable input") and doing the right thing ("I appreciate your effort over the weekend") according to the latest management treatise doing the rounds. Be it '7 Habits' or 'Who moved my cheese' these people are following the prescriptive advice without actually understanding where it comes from. I won't make any direct comment on the books themselves except to say that there seem to be an awful lot which flash in and out of fashion like an old fluorescent tube.
Commonly the followers of this management style are ex-technical people who are deliberately trying to be leaders. Sadly, many of them were better leaders when they weren't trying to be managers; when they weren't trying to live up to some imaginary standard.
On the other hand, there are a great many senior managers - who should know better - who come up with Mission Statements and Visions etc. These can useful tools to bind a team and engage employees. But something whipped up on a weekend junket is not going to engage those people who had to stay at work and keep the engines ticking over while you live it up at a 5 star resort. A good vision emerges from the views and goals of the team. A good leader develops it in conjunction with his staff, not isolated from them. It needs to be relevant and contextual to everyone who is supposed to sign up to it - something they can relate to and aspire to. It does not contain the word "Synergy".
Leadership is not prescriptive (or proscriptive). It varies according to the people in your team and the work that they are doing. It does not come out of a book.
On the other hand 'fake it until you make it' does work - just be prepared for people to laugh at your attempts along the way; and don't believe everything you read.

Learning and understanding

In the last post I mentioned that I seem to learn things differently to most people. I found this description which seems to sum it up. I have always found it easier to get things straight in my own mind if I imagine describing them to others. It was something that I used to do mentally while out running as a teenager - a form of mediation.
One immediate consequence that occurs to me would be that this should also make one a better teacher but I am not sure this worked for me. While I have done quite of bit of teaching (tutoring/lecturing/instruction whatever you want to call it), I am not certain that I am particularly good at it. Once I understand the concept and can explain it to my own satisfaction, I have too little patience with others that have not yet caught on. I think my wife can probably vouch for this :-)
In terms of learning, I suppose I consider the approach of  'do more and more problems until you become familiar with the way of solving it' to be a bit brute force. It is hammering the information into the students minds and holding it there until it stops falling out. I prefer a little more finesse and try to work out how the technique or information fits with what I already know, perhaps adjusting mental models along the way, until there is a space to place the learnings where it will take root.
I am sure that good teachers approach things this way - although I haven't actually thought about it until recently so I haven't taken notice about how I was taught. However, it does require the teacher to understand the topic *in depth* themselves before trying to pass it on. It also requires the student to be willing and able to adjust their mental view of the world to incorporate the new knowledge.
Perhaps I can see why it is not such a common approach.