I was reviewing some old magazines today, and was struck by two with implications for CFS construction. The first, in the July 2006 issue of Communications of the ACM (Avison, et. al, “Managerial IT Unconsciousness”, Comm ACM 49:7, July 2006, pp89-93) was in a special issue about Service Systems. It reviewed three studies done in Australia about service system implementations, all of which were failures. Because failures are a great way to learn, I always find them fascinating.

The whole point of the article was that these projects effectively ran with at best limited managerial involvement. Some of the work was outsourced and there were regular project meetings, but everything was actually in the hands of people with little or no experience and no insight into the actual requirements of the business. The working relationship with upper management was minimal at best with upper management not really understanding or paying attention. It wasn’t just because they were stodgy old companies either since one was a large scale telcom front-runner ramping up with lots of highly committed, educated people involved. The essential problem was lack of management understanding and an inability of the people directly involved to have an impact with decision makers.

This is where the other article comes in because it considers optimizing innovation (Robert L. Glass, “Practical Programmer: Managing for Innovation”, Comm ACM 51:3 Mar 2008 pp17-19). Glass is looking at the work of Watts Humphreys who started the Software Engineering Institute and considering two of his lesser known books on Managing Technical people. His point is that People Matter. How a manager gets the optimum out of his people depends on his understanding and involvement. Managers who don’t know and don’t attempt to understand, as in the first article, are doomed to failure. So are those who are too tight and work in a ‘My Way or the Highway’ mode all the time. Optimum is when management becomes involved directly, reviewing and inputting to plans and development, bringing the business perspective to major projects to make sure they serve the needs of the company.

I’ve seen this kind of thing over and over again, and to combat it, for major projects, I’ve insisted on having representatives on the team that range from the front-line to the highest levels within the company. If more senior managers can’t participate directly, then we work out some way to involve them as much as possible.

Why all this emphasis? Because Customer Facing Systems are critical and can make or break a company. Of the three companies studied in the first article, all three WOULD have been out of business, but two of them had public funding and could write it off. The third did fail completely. A successful customer facing system can mean a significant improvement in working with customers and lead to enhanced long-term profits. A poorly developed one can lead to company failure.

It’s not enough to commit to a system, you need to commit your time and energy to the implementation, to making it work and work right.

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, System Development, Systems Analysis & Design