SBA

Great Techspectations

So, how do you feel about your corporate IT? How do your customers feel when using your website or engaging with your business via technology? How do your employees and suppliers feel about using your IT systems? 

Being a user of technology is frequently complex because technology itself is complex. A phrase I find myself using repeatedly to IT and Business leaders in respect of their internal and outward-facing IT provision is that “Perception is Reality” - and different stakeholders will have differing perceptions of your company’s IT.

You may have incredibly sophisticated internal IT systems which help you to fulfil your customer’s needs efficiently and reliably - but if your website is difficult to use then your customers will think that all of your IT is “pants”. Similarly your staff will not appreciate the sophistication of your internal IT systems if they find them difficult to use, or if the desktop PC which you provide to them seems unintuitive or obstructive due to your corporate IT security policies etc. The reality that, unlike some of your competitors, your IT is reliable and secure, is likely to pass over the heads of most users, internal or external.  What will colour their view of your IT, and therefore of your business, is how it matches up to their expectations - and their expectations are probably quite different to yours or those of your IT providers. I’ve learned this lesson again and again over the years, it’s usually minor considerations that colour perception, and users of IT (i.e. almost all of us) each have their own irrational bugbears. 

Let’s start with one of mine: start-up time. If the start-up time of a personal computer is longer than I need to take off my jacket, get my papers out of my desk and be ready to work, then it’s too slow. The Chromebook I’m typing on right now takes about 10 seconds to boot up from power-on, and around two seconds to wake up if it’s gone into power saving mode because I’ve folded the screen shut. I almost never switch it off because 10 seconds from power-on is a bit too long and I don’t like waiting, so when I’m not using it I will simply close the lid. The whole process of extracting it from my briefcase, opening the lid and being ready to type takes about 5 seconds. You can imagine how irrationally frustrated I feel about waiting two minutes for a normal desktop PC to start up, or a sluggish website.

An ex-colleague in the UK had a thing about meeting face to face. Shortly after I moved to the island and started working mostly from home I was visiting our company headquarters in Yorkshire when he cornered me and bemoaned that he could no longer just pop into my office to run ideas past me. I suggested he phone me if he wanted a word, and pointed out that if he called my internal telephone extension number it would ring simultaneously in both my office in our Yorkshire HQ and in my office at home on the Isle of Man. He then “confessed” that he was uncomfortable having discussions on the ‘phone because he couldn’t read the other person’s face to see how they were reacting.  I don’t know if he took in the surprise in my expression, but it was a considerable revelation to me that a mature and sophisticated company executive with whom I had worked for over a decade had a telephone phobia - at least it explained why his company mobile phone bills were so low in comparison with the rest of us.

Similarly, in my office in HQ, like many executives I had a meeting table and would frequently have meetings with my first line management team about the matters of the day, service quality, progress on projects etc. In order to participate in these meetings when working from home I installed a small video-conferencing system in my Yorkshire office which could be wheeled up to the table and connected to a similar system at home. At 9am most mornings my first line would pop into my office for brief start-of-day meeting, with me in person if I was in the UK, and via video if I was on the Isle of Man. Some took to it naturally, but others were quite wooden via video when they would normally be totally relaxed meeting with me in person. I asked one of the latter, a senior IT manager who had worked for me for over a decade, why she was reticent in these video meetings and she explained that she didn’t feel comfortable talking to the camera. 

Personally I take video-conferencing for granted as much better for meetings than using the telephone because since becoming partially deaf I find I can’t reliably identify who is speaking in multi-party telephone conferences - and I can’t lip-read a speaker-phone; but I can understand and accept that talking to a camera and seeing the other party “on the telly” is still alien to many people.

It’s not surprising then that when my daughter, who lives in the UK, recently suggested that we set up a video link for a Sunday morning when my wife’s parents would be visiting us so that she could “join us for coffee”, I was happy to set it up at home but uncertain how they, both in their late eighties, would get on talking with their grand-daughter via my laptop screen. I needn’t have worried - they sat down on our sofa, and without any warning I opened my laptop and there was #1 grand-daughter beaming at them:- confounding my trepidation they were immediately chatting and joking via video and the conversation and laughter flowed non stop for over an hour as though they were all in the same room. 

One more anecdote. One of the reasons the business in the UK was so successful was the marketing genius of the CEO and founder. He genuinely understood the problems which our business attempted to solve for our customers, and was brilliant at communicating the relevance of our offering to their business challenges, He was, like so many marketing driven executives, seduced by the amazing capabilities of technology to enable the presentation of information in a dynamic and engaging way. Consequently in 2001 he showed me a wonderful piece of web animation which he had commissioned from a graphic designer, and said he wanted it on the front page of our website. I said no, and pointed out that unlike us in our modern offices with our modern IT systems and expensive dedicated connections to the Internet, many of our customers were very small business owners and managers using older computers with small screens and slow dial-up connections to the Internet - this wonderful animation which worked perfectly for us would simply not work on some of our customers computers, and would mean that our website would take forever to load for most customers. 

The lesson I’m trying to give you with these little personal recollections is that our attitudes towards using technology are personal and unpredictable, and in trying to create successful business IT, whether for our staff in our offices or for customers using our e-commerce systems, we need to take these quirks into account. It really doesn’t matter how expensive and sophisticated our computer systems are, if the people who we want to use our systems don’t feel comfortable using them - because they seem slow, or unintuitive, or illogical and complicated to use - then they will avoid using them and our technology investment will be wasted. The same marketing guru who rammed “Perception is Reality” into my ears until I “got it” also helped me to understand that one of the golden rules of customer service “do unto others as you would have them do to you” is bad advice, success is much more likely if you “treat people how they want to be treated”, and this is especially true if we want them to use our business IT.

For all the investment we make in technology, whatever we may think is best as businesses, employers etc., the measure that really matters is whether people feel they can use it easily, reliably and safely. If they can then they will, but if we get it wrong then our staff will avoid using our fancy IT systems and use less efficient but more comfortable methods to do their work, and our customers will irrationally choose other suppliers with websites and e-commerce systems which make them feel more comfortable transacting online, even though we are theoretically the cheaper, more responsive, more reliable and better supplier. When we design our corporate technology and justify our investments in new systems we usually start with what it will do for our operations, our business processes and capabilities - we look inwards to our own perceived commercial needs when very often we should be looking outward to the people who will have to use it and asking ourselves - “will it meet their expectations, will our employees / customers / prospects adopt it as better than what we have now?” If the answer isn’t “Yes” then maybe we’re wasting our time and money.