Business Transformation Myopia

The grass is always greener, on the other side.

Ah, Utopia!

A place which is good, or a place which is nowhere - because it doesn't really exist?

For the last twenty years, I have spent much of my working days picking the bones out of a business process which kicks into action off the back of some inbound mailbox receipt.

In the early 2000s I was working in Luton on the GM*DRIVE account. One of my roles, while still an Apprentice Software Developer, was sending reports out to various European Sales Orgs for Vauxhall and Opel. Every morning I would check if the reports had processed. If they had, I would open up a few key reports and check the numbers against the mainframe. If they were correct, everything was OK. I would then open up Lotus Notes and attach the reports and dispatch them. Every day. And , at Month End I would send out another bunch of reports, helping the sales teams track their MTD, YTD and YOY.

Every night, a job would run which pulled the data from DB2 into a (SMART) *NIX server and performed ETLs with some Oracle PL/SQL. Once completed, these would get dropped via FTP to the SQL Server running on a Windows 2000 box, under my desk. This would kick off a load of Stored Procs , chucking critical sales data into Access then exporting specific stats into Word and Excel. Finally, a load of VBA would run to format these reports with macros to make them look pretty. The real beauty of it ? Each Sales Org had their own Access Database, their own reports and , their own macros!

If there were any issues with any reports, I had to trace back the bug and fix it. Urgently, without any Incident or Problem Management in sight.

When the reports were ready, I would use Lotus Notes (which I really didn't like) to send them out. I asked why. It was merely due to the attachment sizes. Everything else was using Exchange for Email.

Why were reports so important?

One Word: Process.

My customers, the European Sales Organisations, were moving vehicles around the continent. They needed to know what stock was available and when it would be landing at the dealerships. Vehicle sales serve as a critical economic indicator. So much hangs off the back of every new registration, and every purchase.

Luton was still somewhat of an industrial heartland with the Vauxhall factory until they announced the closure - which sent shockwaves through the local area , and the building where I worked. GM & EDS were joined at the hip for so long. When EDS lost the GM account, raw emotions were palpable.

Service Then, vs. ServiceNow

In what almost seems like another life entirely, from 2004-2009, I was responsible for managing New Business requests , first for UK Midrange Hosting Services and later for the entire UKIMEA Data Centre Operations. Almost every single sales pursuit, RFP and ROM, came through my hands and started with... a request in a mailbox! And along every step of the way, I would track the process, with... reports!

When I first started working with ServiceNow, in 2014, it was to support the IS Change Management process for Whitbread (Hotels and Restaurants). Imagine my surprise on day one, when the first step in the process was to receive an email with an RFC attached to a word document, in a Lotus Notes Mailbox!

I had to transpose the change request information from an often mistyped, poorly structured, Word Doc into ServiceNow in preparation for the Weekly CAB. I used to set the agenda, and publish the Forward Schedule of Change, which was essentially just... a report!

So what?

It is not only in Utopia where everyone talks about the perfect reports for their business.

But, it is only in Myopia where they do not.