This morning I read an article in the paper that talked about how police officers have found a way around the statute of limitations.  As you may know, the notion of a statute of limitations is that if you commit a crime, there is only a certain amount of time after you commit the crime that you can be charged or indicted for that crime.  So if someone robs a bank, and there’s a five year statute of limitations on that crime, if they figure out who did it five years and a day later, that robber can’t be charged with it.

For some really nasty crimes, particularly rape, the police and the victims hate letting those crimes see their statute of limitations expire without an arrest.  One solution would be to extend the statute of limitations, but that gets away from the point of this entry.

What the police have done to get around the statute of limitations on these crimes, is when they have a DNA sample of the criminal, which is particularly common in rape cases, the police are indicting the identity of the DNA, which they can do, and then if they can figure out who that DNA belongs to, they can then arrest them even after the statute of limitations has expired, which I think is pretty clever.

My guess is that if police can start to assemble a large enough data base of criminal DNA, if criminals know their DNA is in the system, I bet that will have a noticeable impact on recurrence of crime in the repeat offenders category.

Enough about crime.

Even though the war on identity theft will go on forever, it strikes me that we will see many new and interesting ways to identify people whether they are or are not present.  I suspect that in the not too distant future we will look back and laugh at all of the passwords we currently use to identify ourselves with everything from bank cards to e-mail accounts.  Finger print and optical scanners will be very pervasive.   I also think there are some near term applications to things like licensing that can have broader business implications.

Currently I have to carry a driver’s license, and proof of auto insurance, and a fishing license (if I go fishing).  Right now my driver’s license is a pretty good form of physical identification for many things (from airports to gaining access to bars), but I know my state knows my social security number, and it wouldn’t be hard to renew my driver’s license electronically (linked to that number – but they would still have to take my photo and check my vision) and thus not have to carry a license (police cars have computers and they can bring up photos).  I should also be able to link my insurance data to my driver’s license electronically, so that I wouldn’t have to carry proof of insurance AND the state would have a better sense of who is actually driving without insurance.  Same thing with the fishing license – I shouldn’t have to carry that any more.

Beyond that, when a game warden is checking to see if all of the fisher men and women parked in the lot near the fishing hole have licenses, instead of asking for proof (and stopping the fishing) the game warden could simply look up all of the license plates to see who has a fishing license (and if it turns out that some of the fisherman don’t have driver’s licenses or insurance, he can notify the group that handles that).  I realize some of this is too “big brother” for a lot of our comfort levels, I am simply using this as an example to point out that there are some really clever, available methods to link a person to a piece of information for both security and enforcement purposes, and I hope people have an open mind about what’s possible and smart with these options.

And bravo to New York’s finest for coming up with the DNA indictment, very clever.

-Ric

Is it wise to review process workflow to understand business requirements before embarking on a change? Yes

Are process workflows often misleading when it comes to understanding requirements?  Yes

How can this be?

Simple, for several reasons.

1) Process workflows are usually created through interviews with people who do the work.  While that’s logical, the problem it’s not their job to describe their job, so people often leave out “obvious” details and use company/industry specific jargon and acronyms.

2) If you go into a department to interview five different people who do the same work and ask them to document the steps involved in the work that they do, the odds that you are going to get five identical sets of steps are very, very low.

3) Most importantly, process is a depiction of “how” the work is completed today, and the “how” labels often mask the “what” that is being done, the why, the outcome of the work.  This is what I call the “how” trap that I talk about extensively in the book Rethink.

And yet process is be vital, but I will get to that in a moment.

This is a diagram of an actual process workflow map from an actual company that creates insurance quotes for its customers.  It starts out with a symbol of a fax machine with the label “Receive Fax” and there are other steps such as “Send Fax to Agent” and “Mail Agreement” and when I asked the people who do this work if those are requirements, the people all said “Yes” without hesitation.

But even though I had never set foot in this organization before, and even though I am not an expert in the insurance business, I could tell that it was very unlikely that those are requirements. Why?  Because “Fax” and “Mail” are “how” verbs.  When someone is sending a fax “what” they are doing is actualy something along the lines of “Communicate Status” or “Confirm Order” –  it is vital to separate “what” the work is from “how” it is done so that you can test whether it matters whether a fax machine is used to communicate the status of the insurance quote to the agent (in this case).  This company has been creating insurance quotes for over 50 years, and while I am confident they have always communicated the status of quotes to agents, it’s unlikely they have always used the fax machine.

I also often use the example of flight check in.  Is it a requirement that we go to the counter and talk with an airline employee to check in for a flight?20 years ago that was the only way to do it, but now we can check in using a kiosk or the web.  We are still accomplishing the same outcome, but we have three choices relative to “how” we go about it – it doesn’t matter who does the work, where it happens, or what the technology is as long as it gets done.

That’s where process comes in.  Once you have a clear understanding of “what” the work is, the outcome, why you are doing it, then you need to understand how it is being done.  That’s when it is so valuable to have those five different process workflows I mentioned above.   When you get all of those different views of the people doing the work, that’s where you learn about exception handling and best practices and who is accountable for what.  From there, understanding what’s most, and least, valuable and how things are performing, then you are well on your way to having clear and objective prioritization of the problems and opportunities that you face.

In the 10,000 plus hours I have spent helping organizations rethink their work, I have discovered what I call the 20/80 rule.  When you sit down with people and ask them what portion of their business is unique in terms of why customers, partners, and even employees want to be associated with them, most people come back with a number around 80% or even 90%.  Mapping the “whats” that make up the organization, the business capabilities, results in a business architecture, and when you have that, together with value and performance scoring, what the organization realizes is that the per cent of the organization that is really unique, is closer to 20%, often less.  Thus the 20/80 rule.  So what?  This is great news for everyone.

For executives – instead of focusing their energies and scorecards on 80% of the business, they can be far more focused

For managers and their employees – they can have greater confidence that they have the right metrics and prioritization

For the people in the information technology (IT) department, they now have the ability to have an objective dialogue with the business about requirements, and when it’s clear that something isn’t high value to the business (>80% of the work), there is no need for expensive customizations to software, duplicative work will be unmasked and people can share a common process and software, and as those savings are realized, the business can start to see more clearly where they need to invest in IT for differentiation and innovation.

So process is vital, but it can really hurt you if you use it at the wrong stage in your efforts.

-Ric

For so many years, the consumer was really controlled by the companies they bought goods and services from.  Little by little, the consumer has taken that control back.  Broadcast television is the most recent industry to experience that shift.

In the book Rethink I emphasize the importance of staying in touch with what your customers really value, which has become harder and harder in a lot of industries as it becomes easier for customers to find alternative products and services that meet their specific needs.

I am not an expert in television, but it seems like every year or two there is an article about a show that is a huge hit that wasn’t originally a huge hit, and because today the networks give shows such a short period of time to succeed or fail, many of the biggest hits of the past wouldn’t have survived the current scrutiny because it took longer for them to build their audience.  Specifically I remember this to be true for the comedy series “Everybody Loves Raymond” which ran for many seasons after a very slow start.

The odd thing about television is that historically it has been one of the most prescriptive experiences out there.  Until fairly recently, the networks decided what we would watch and when we would watch it.  It became the battle of the networks, where it was widely accepted that a lot of people watch television on Thursday and Sunday nights, so the best shows would air then and the networks would vie for your viewership.   This was somewhat mocked in the spooky show “The Outer Limits” when the voiceover would come on saying:

“

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits. — Opening narration  – The Control Voice  – 1960s

”

So when I read the article “Later Viewings of Shows on DVRs Brigthens Ratings” by Bill Carter in The New York Times, it struck me that the tables have completely turned and now the customer has taken control of the television.  While Tivo was the pioneer in the space, now the typical cable operator allows you to use the menu to select recent shows that have aired at their regular time, and you can watch them when you want to, and it’s pretty thorough.  I happen to like the new show “The Good Wife” and I have been watching it using this service.

What the networks have realized is that instead of measuring the success of a show based on the viewing of when it airs, they now need to wait a week or more to see how many people watch the show.  As the article points out, this new measure of success puts a very different lens on the success of some shows.

That’s what’s getting so complicated for so many industries, as consumer patterns and behaviors shift, organizations have to be very careful about using the same old measuring stick to interpret customer satisfaction.  I think this trend will continue in broadcast television, but I also think we will see the emergence of new, volatile, and immature ways of measuring these shifts because it’s all so new.

OK, it’s Tuesday morning at 11:10, I am going to watch the newest episode of “Two and a Half Men”

-Ric

What is an innovation?  Is it doing something new, or is it a new way to do something familiar?  Or is it both?

Recently Mary Tripsas of the Harvard Business School wrote an article that appeared in The New York Times.  The article “It’s Brand New, but Make It Sound Familiar” suggests that it’s more the latter, and that because of that, when people introduce the new way of “how” we do something, for it to catch on, people need to associate it with the other way of doing it.

Tripsas takes us back to the introduction of the automobile and says that people didn’t at first understand why they would want a car, until someone came up with the phrase “horseless carriage” as a way to explain what the car was displacing.  I guess it was a lot easier for people to see the value of air travel since there are no equivalently outdated expressions for that.

When I write about innovation, I describe it as coming up with a new way to do something in a way that doesn’t resemble the way it was done before.  In other words, you can change how something is accomplished, but if it’s still pretty much the same “how” it’s done, then it’s just a change, it’s not an innovation.  Checking in for flights using the internet as opposed to face-to-face with an airline employee at the airport meets that definition of innovation, as does renting movies through the internet versus going to a store location.

What’s the dichotomy?  You want to showcase this innovation, but in order for people to make the connection about why they care, you have to link it to the old, boring (current) way it’s done.

Renting videos over the internet instead of going to the store is a pretty good example of simply finding a much better “how”  to accomplish “what” the customer wants, which is to rent a movie.  An innovation in the simplest sense.  The car on the other hand is in a more complex category of innovation (and there are many others like it but I will stick with it for continuity) where the innovation did in fact do what the carriage could do, but it also enabled things that were impossible, even unimaginable in carriage days. Carriages were comparatively slow and as a consequence, people could only accomplish a limited amount of travel in a given day. Even with early models of cars, people were able to not only be more efficient with their time, they became able to make trips they wouldn’t have imagined making with carriages. On a typical day I will take my son to school (5 miles) ,drive to work (20 miles), work at my office for six hours, go back to the school (20 miles), go to a grocery store (5 miles), drive to have dinner friends (7 miles) and be home by 8:00 and that’s not even a hectic day.  Unless we lived in a small town, which we do not, nothing like that was possible with a carriage, and it gets into our heads when we think about planning our day – our notion of what is possible is radically different from carriage days.

I think it’s uncontroversial to say that e-mail (and to an extent instant messages) is a similar type of innovation where it did in fact replace some forms of communication such as memoranda, but it has also grown into so much more than that in a way that we can stay in constant touch with the people we want to.

I say this often, but I happen to think social networking is going to fall into this same category.  Facebook and Twitter have already had a transformational effect on how some groups connect and communicate, but my expectation is that it’s going to continue to evolve, in good ways and in bad in ways most of us can’t even imagine yet.   Can you imagine trying to explain a fax to someone who doesn’t know what a phone is – there’s nothing familiar to get them there?  I think that’s where we will be with social networking in ten years.  Today we are the ones who don’t know what a phone is.

-Ric

OK, I will admit it on this one, there may be a very simple answer on this that I am just not seeing.  So let me know if that’s the case.

This morning I read an article in The New York Times by Brad Stone ‘Clear’ Security service May Return to Airports.  I did some research on the story (though I will admit it was probably even less research that Dan Rather did on his George Bush story a couple of years ago – that was also in the paper today) and I couldn’t get a straight explanation about what this “Clear” service with its “Verified Identity Pass” actually offers passengers or airports.  Evidently it helps airline passengers spend a lot less time in security lines at the airport for a fee of around $200 per year.

As I read through this article that talked about the fact that “Clear” may come back online after running out of cash earlier in the year, I started to try to piece together exactly what is going on with airport security.  What outcome is TSA (which stands for Transportation Security Administration – not “taking scissors away” as some joke) trying to accomplish?  What may seem obvious to you is not obvious to me.  Is the goal to test whether passengers are a threat the day of the flight, or is the goal slightly different from that?

In the book Rethink I examine the flight check in process and suggest that there are really three outcomes that need to be achieved at that stage of the process:

1) Confirm Reservation

2) Complete Survey

3) Document Checked Baggage (if applicable)

There are two basic points in breaking up those pieces, and they are that the airlines have figured out that it doesn’t matter who is doing the work (employee or passenger), where it happens (counter, kiosk, web), or what the technology is that’s used to accomplish those three outcomes, but more importantly for the airlines, instead of looking for airline industry best practices for this set of “whats” or outcomes, seeing that none of the three things necessarily has anything to do with the airline industry, the opportunity to look for best practices in other industries that do those three things really opens the door of possibilities for improvement (increasing the need to be specific and measured about why you would change it and how you define success).

OK, that’s check in.  Now on to security.  What is really going on there?  Is it to test that each passenger does not pose a potential threat to the flight/airport today, or is it a broader test of whether this person is generally a threat?  Stone’s article talks about Clear customers having to submit to fingerprinting and iris scanning, but that sounds more like identity testing and today whether people use their driver’s license or a passport, that’s the least invasive, fastest part of the current process.  That’s the first thing I got confused about.

The implication is that Clear customers get to shoot to the front of the line like airline employees and first class (and mile plan elite) passengers.  I understand the airline employees getting to cut the line, but I haven’t really understood why first class passengers get to cut the line.  First class passengers are actually the highest risk of the bunch since they are in a closed off section right next to the pilot’s cabin.  Mile plan people make more sense to me because they fly a lot and they are most familiar with the process so they are probably fast.

Assuming the Clear people still have to take their shoes off and use the quart size zip top bag with nothing over three ounces and go through the X-ray (please tell me if I am wrong about that), then the $200 annual fee is really just a line cutting tax and the iris/finger printing thing is really just superfluous?  If the actual security testing of these people is less rigorous than the rest of us, then someone has decided that the goal of security is a test of who is a threat to the flight/airport in general and that there’s no need for more rigorous testing the day of the flight.  That seems strange to me.

What am I missing on this?

-Ric

The September Harvard Business Review includes an article “What Service Customers Really Want” by Dave Dougherty and Ajay Murthy.

Read it for yourself, but the basic premise is that you need to delight your customers with the customer service you provide.  There’s a interesting graph illustrating that what we customers want, more than anything, is to speak with someone knowledgeable and they want their issue resolved on the first call. If we, the customer don’t receive this level of service, we will take our business elsewhere.

But I caution you before heeding this seemingly sage guidance.

In my experience, this guidance holds in only a certain percentage of cases, and if you are in a business that falls outside of this customer satisfaction Venn diagram, then you are wasting time and money.

In the book Rethink I say that once you understand the “whats” that make up your business (before looking at “how” they are done), you then mark which are high and low value, and then mark how they are performing.  In my definition business value of any given block of work is the combination of three things:

1) Does it relate to your brand or identity in terms of why customers, partners, or employees do business with you or work with you?

2) Does it have a direct connection to a key performance indicator of the organization?

3) Is there value in improving the performance of that block of work?

I offer several examples of common blocks of work that fail all three tests, including Pay Employees, and then ask people to apply the same work they do in their department, division, or the organization as a whole.

While I agree 100% that you have to stay in close touch with what’s most important to your customer, I reject the notion that customer service is always high on the list. I can think of lots of companies that I don’t like, but I still buy their products or services because they are the best at meeting whatever need I have, whether the primary measure of satisfaction is quality, price, timing, or something else.  Remember the “soup nazi” from the TV show Seinfeld?  People didn’t like him and he didn’t like his customers, but his soup as so great people put up with him (and that character was based on a real soup chef in NewYork).

There are plenty of examples of this in business, but one directly from the pages of Rethink is the online bank ING DIRECT.  Here’s a bank that focuses on delivering very high interest rates to the savings accounts of their customers.  They are so focused on this as their #1 goal, they cut way back on the level of phone support they offer their customers.  They don’t care if a customer has a bad experience on phone support because that’s not what they are “selling” to the customer.  While that is an example of an organization that wants you to take your business elsewhere if you are unhappy about the level of customer service.

If I buy a Snickers candy bar and it tastes bad or the wrapper didn’t seal the product correctly, will I expect great customer service from the makers of Snickers? Nope, and I bet they don’t spend a lot of money on that – Snickers is a well established product and for a product that’s usually less than a dollar, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would expect to be delighted with their customer service.

From there we go to amazon.com, where I may search for a new pair of shoes and I may want the best price for a big name – in that case price is my number one goal, so if I have a bad experience with the product, I am not going to expect amazon.com to delight me with their customer service because I put price ahead of everything else in terms of what I as the customer valued in that transaction.

So if you are thinking about beefing up your customer service because of this article, be sure you are really in touch with the value proposition you have with your customers, or you might do yourself a huge dis-service.

-Ric