Conquer Complexity by Embracing It

While reading this excellent post by Nicole France from Constellation Research, I couldn’t help but think about the complexity that goes into most every customer interaction and how that compounds for your business. Whether it be employee-to-customer, employee-to-employee, or employee-to-machine, there’s a growing network of complexity and inter-connectivity at any given stage.

In the face of this, many organizations prefer to ignore this dilemma rather than strengthen their foundations and basics in order to be able to execute effectively. As Nicole points out, complexity is unavoidable – even if a business is trying to look the other way.  And if your management chooses to ignore the complexity, it will still fall onto your customer service professionals or field technicians to meet demanding customer expectations. I love this quote that she uses from Designing the Global Corporation by Jay R. Galbraith:

“At the heart of the issue is the manager’s difficulty embracing the complexity of the organization and building the capability to manage it. Most managerial mindsets…may also be influenced by the so-called management principle of ‘keeping it simple.’ Yet serious students of cross-border organization have arrived at the position keeping it simple is stupid; the world is complex, and a simple organization in a complex world becomes less and less viable.”

In a world where complexity is real, it is having the right technology and talent that are great at executing on the foundational basics that lead to excellence.

We think about this a lot at IFS. In an environment where we’re working with some of the most complex service roll-outs in the world, the challengers who are our customers embrace that complexity, and use our technology not just to simplify it to the “basics” that can be repeatedly and consistently executed on, when appropriate, but to turn it into an asset. It’s what sets our Service Management product apart at IFS. This allows us to master complexity without compromise, keeping even the broadest deployments deep enough produce powerful positive service outcomes.

No matter the industry, service is a uniquely multifaceted function of a business, and if you’re skimming over the complex interactions happening every day rather than tackling them head-on, you’ll pass the challenges onto your technicians, or worse, your customers. You owe it to yourself to use the tools available today to make your complexity work for you and grow your skills and capability to handle complexity like the champs that you can be. We live in a connected and complex world - embrace it -- and also invest in the technology to conquer it.