A QUICK QUIZ by W H Inmon

A QUICK QUIZ

By W H Inmon

For years the user community has not felt that it has been served well by the IT community. Witness the flight to outsourcing. Do you think that if the IT community had been serving the user community well that there ever would have been the movement to sending IT processing overseas.

There have been many reasons for the failure of IT. But one of the leading reasons is that IT doesn’t even know what the mainstream business of the corporation is today. IT is loyal to IT and the business sort of exists over in a corner.

Once upon a time IT was positioned as a full time business partner. Today IT has become a caretaker and doesn’t even recognize business opportunity even when it is flashed in front of its face.

So is it even possible to turn IT into a true profit center? Can you really do that? Here’s a little self-administered  exam to see if you are looking for love in all the wrong places (like Johnny Lee in Urban Cowboy).

Question 1: Do you know what conditions and terms are in your corporate contracts? Can you find – down to the penny – what you your company is owed? What is owed by your corporation? Can you find – down to the minute and hour – when deadlines and expiration dates are? And what are the penalties for missing the expiration dates? This is a really good place to start to look for business value but no one does it.

Question 2: what are people saying about your company – its products and its services – on the Internet? Do you monitor the Internet regularly to find out how your company and its products and services are perceived? Or do you think the Internet is just a place where teenagers hang out and play Candy Crush?

Question 3: do you regularly solicit and monitor feedback from your customer? Do you listen to the complaints made by the customer? The suggestions made by the customer? The questions asked by the customer? Or do you not bother to hear from your customer at all? Does your customer have a normal and easy path to get feedback to the decision makers of your corporation?

Question 4: do you take customer surveys on a regular basis? Do you pay any attention to the comments that are written on the survey by the customer? Do you even allow the customer to make comments? Do you realize that on most surveys the comments made by the customer are the most valuable part of the survey?

Question 5: you have email. Do you analyze email and find out what is on your customers mind? Do you know what the customer is saying about your company? Or do you read the email once, archive it, and never look at it again?

Question 6: do you listen to what your customer is actually saying to you in your call center/800 number? Or do you just keep track of how many calls you get? Or do you take each call and analyze the call to find out what the customer is complaining about? Or complimenting you on? Or wants to buy? Or wants instructions on? Most people only have a vague idea of what is actually being said in their call center…

If you are like most corporations, you have a perfect NO for each question. Most corporations are oblivious to what their customers are saying. Yet they continually complain about the cost of IT.

(Note: cheating on a self-administered test is like cheating at solitaire. If you cheated you are only fooling yourself.)

If you don’t believe that listening to your customer is important just ask Eastern Airlines. Or Howard Johnsons. Or B Dalton. Or Roos/Atkins. Or Kenny Rogers Roasters. But wait - you might find it hard to ask any of these companies because they are no longer in business. But maybe you can find someone that used to work for them. Maybe they can tell you if listening to the customer is an important thing to do. Maybe…

Bill Inmon lives in Denver, Colorado. Two of Bill’s latest books are TURNING TEXT INTO GOLD and HEARING THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER, Technics Publications, 2018. Bill wrote DATACHITECTURE: SECOND EDITION, Elsevier Publications. Bill’s company – Forest Rim Technology – disambiguates text.