Agility

I was talking with a coworker this afternoon about a new tool that's being rolled out -- it's a replacement for multiple contact lists. Let's call it MegaContact. Conceptually, its a marvelous idea. When you want someone, you don't have to know where their contact list is -- you just go to MegaContact, and there they are. In a way, its an extension of the SameTime product which we use quite a lot for instant messages, and also of another product we have that lists people by multiple criteria -- name, phone number, group, specialty, and so on. (Most people don't fill in more than the absolute minimum, but thats still a useful thing to have available.) So, MegaContact makes sense.

But like many of the internal tools that my company produces for its own use, it's poorly designed, and not at all responsive to user needs, let alone whims. It doesn't work the way you might think, and since it took so long to get it operational, they'll be damned if they're going to rewrite it. So, for example, if you currently want to know who Network Support is today for account Bimarcks Wargoods, you find the contact list for Bismarcks, and then you look through four or five support groups until you find Network. In the era of MegaContact, you look through every support group until you find Network (and you hope and pray its called that, and not something else that makes sense once you know it, but isn't intuititively obvious, like Commununcations or Telecommunications or Customer Networking or..), and then, once you find it, you look through all of the customers there till you find Bismarcks -- or is it Wargoods, Bismarck? Perhaps its Commercial -- Bismarcks, or Commercial -- B. Wargds. Hoo, boy.

So after a while you begin to get the picture. The bigger the organization, the more static, buggy, and non-user-friendly the apps are, and the more non-responsive the support groups for those apps tend to be. Thats not how it should be, and its not how small companies succeed. They've got to do it by making their apps nimble, and thats what big companies should do. They can't muscle their way in, by and large, because the other players are all pretty big, too. But how to do that? The challenge for leaders -- not managers, of whom there are a plethora, but leaders, of whom there are damn few -- is to make the groups they lead responsive and 'customer-focused'. They've got to live and die on the excellence of their product.

In other words, exactly the opposite of how most of us at Big Gihugic Software, Inc, actually work.