Considering the Whole System

There are days, quite many of them, when working with the IT department leaves me deeply frustrated at their myopic and blasé attitude toward the goals of the organization.   Even on a good day, IT people are difficult people to work with, their minds so much in the machine world that they completely miss the big picture in the human world.   I realize I’m speaking in stereotypes, but I can’t genuinely apologize because a stereotype would not exist if there weren’t large numbers of people who conform to it … but let me be more specific:

It is all too common for technology workers to focus on the technology to the exclusion of everything else – nothing exists to them outside of the server room.   The system is up and running, and no error messages are being thrown, so everything’s hunky-dory and there’s no cause for alarm or any need to take action.  When designing a new system, the goal is to have “zero defects” such that the system runs efficiently and the lights stay green on the dashboard that monitors system performance.

What they fail to realize is that the computer systems are one component of a larger system: the value delivery system.   Just because the computer system is running smoothly doesn’t mean the value delivery system is running smoothly – it may in fact be horribly broken.  And what’s worse, the value delivery system may be broken by design, built so that the computer system will have the appearance of flawlessness, while outside the server room, Rome is burning.

Likely I’m still in the clouds – let me switch out the telescope for a microscope:  consider the problem of a single question-answer pair in ordering a customized product.   From a technical perspective, everything checks out if the question is displayed properly, if the user is able to provide an answer, if the system is able to receive that answer, and if the system is able to process the answer to arrive at a predicted output.

There’s not a concern for whether the user is able to understand the question, or to answer it accurately – because when that process breaks down, the computer system does not throw an error.   The value system, however, has a serious malfunction: the customer does not get what they want (or need) because they have not been provided enough guidance to answer the question.    

If the user is confused by the question, or feels uncertain enough, they will not answer it, and may abandon the process if the question is mandatory.   When that happens, the computer system does not throw an error.     The attitude in the IT department is that it’s not their fault if the customer is too stupid to use their system correctly – and there is far more tolerance for this attitude than their ought to be, because it is poisonous to customer experience and the success of the firm.

When a user abandons a transaction online because it is awkward, it should be taken just as seriously as if the IT system had crashed, because it’s tantamount to the same thing: the value delivery system has experienced a catastrophic failure for that user because of the poorly designed interface to the computer system.

The value system, like a computer system, can have redundancies and backups.  Specifically, there are other channels a customer can use to complete their order – they can call or visit a store – so ultimately, the value system doesn’t fail completely, though chances are some customers will bail out entirely when they encounter an obstacle.   Granted, providing phone or in-store service is much more expensive for the organization and much less convenient for the customer ... but again, not a technical issue.

The irony is that the IT department does spin up when something happens in the server room.  If the primary system is constantly failing and the backup system saves the day, they are not blithely indifferent – but instead, they show very great interest in fixing things so that the primary system does its job properly.   If only they had the same level of dedication to the value delivery system, and the ability to recognize that every time a customer abandons a transaction, that is just as big a problem for the company as a computer system failure.

Ultimately, I’m struggling to find a way to get the IT department to recognize that their computer systems are a component in a larger system, and that while their component may not be setting off its own internal alarms, it is still malfunctioning terribly.  I’m not sure if I have a clear method for doing this, but my sense is that getting them to consider the whole system, not just their part of it, might be a metaphor they can grasp.