Change Your Vocabulary and Change Your Focus

I often hear IT folks talk of projects such as converting plants on to one system, or reorganizing all of IT into one centrally controlled IT group.  When you ask them why they are advocating these things the answer is often - efficiency.  Wouldn't things be  better if everyone was on the same system or if we were all in the same group?  I guess it a characteristic trait of people in technological fields, we want to make things better.

While I certainly appreciate the benefits of being more efficient I can help but want to ask two questions.  First, more efficient for whom?  Hopefully it is the business operations that we've made more efficient and not just the IT operations?  And secondly, for whom does this make things better?  Again, hopefully it is the business that is reaping most of the benefits of this improved efficiency.

Too often however the answer is to both questions is IT.  We puff up our chests and proudly exclaim about the great job we've done in reducing our costs and improving our operations.  If we look closely though we just might see that those outside of IT don't share our enthusiasm.  We tend to be too internally focused on ourselves and on efficiency / cost reduction.  The good news is that's what we're good at doing.  The bad news is while it is nice that really isn't what the business see as our most important role.  This internal/efficiency focus helps explain how it is that while the CEO may feel information technology is important to success of the company, the information technology department isn't.  We've made ourselves into a utility and left the business to fend for it self on the strategic use of information technology.

I'd like to suggest that we change our focus and let's start by changing our vocabulary.

Here a radical idea.  Let's stop talking about efficiency and instead start concentrating on effectiveness.  Efficiency is about doing things right.  Effectiveness is about doing the right things.  Obviously, if you really have it together you're doing both, but most of us aren't there yet.  In that case I'd rather concentrate on being effective.  I believe it is better to be inefficiently effective than efficiently ineffective.  In the long run I believe that effectiveness will have the greater benefit and by concentrating on that we increase the value of the IT department to the company and can get the time and resources to be both effective and efficient.  From the customer's standpoint they want good service and don't care about what it took you to get it.  Conversely, they don't find your efficient delivery of poor service very inspiring or likely to get them to come back.

To illustrate let's look at a problem.  A customer service rep (CSR) has to spend a lot of time getting order status information pulled together when a customer calls in.  They have to double check the status because we don't trust the system we call various people and get updates and commitments and hopefully pull together what we hope is an accurate summary.  The efficient way to handle this would be to have all this information in the system where people can update the information so that the CSR can pull it up on his screen and read it of to the customer when he calls.  Hopefully, everyone did their job right in keeping the system update properly.  The effective approach would be to design the system to collect the data automatically, do it in an error-proofed manner and then push it to the customer automatically.  Don't make the customer call the CSR at all but instead provide it directly and automatically to the customer.

Another interesting thing is to take a look at your corporate strategies and objectives.  Some typical examples include:

• Cost Reduction (an efficiency measure)
• Improved Customer Service (an effectiveness measure)
• Reduced Lead Time (an effectiveness measure)
• Improved Quality (an effectiveness measure)

Interestingly enough if you concentrate on the efficiency related items you run the risk of adversely affecting the effectiveness ones.  For example, cutting costs too deeply you can reduce quality.  Conversely, concentrating on the effectiveness items very often also gets you some of the efficiency items.  For example concentrating on improving quality will often lead to cost reduction.

My suggestion for IT to improve it performance and how the CEO perceives us is to shift our vocabulary and our focus from efficiency to effectiveness.

How do you feel about this?

"Focus" photo by ihtatho

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• How's Your Rain Dancing?
• What's Your Niche of Inconvenience?
• The CIO as Salesman
• Or the posts in the "Strategy & Management" category