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Automation is not beautiful
Aug. 14th, 2012 02:33 pmA repeat of something I posted on Facebook:
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/08/united-airlines-lost-my-friends-10-year-old-daughter-and-didnt-care.html
Link to the above to read a salutary tale.
This is what happens when a company, and the system, is broken. UA won't bother to comment because I'm not NBC. But this is a set list of what dealing with big companies is like these days. Feelings of complete helplessness, despair and anger.
I had a far smaller example of this with Computershare.co.uk yesterday. My PIN would not work. I had to spend 15 minutes on the phone (an 0870 number) before I found out that the PINs "expire" after "three to six months". During the first call the man asked me for my name, then my address, then my date of birth, and then for my employer number. When I said that this was ridiculous in that I wasn't asking to be given access to the site or any confidential information, he said:
"This is just normal security procedure to protect you",
at which point I snapped and said "Bollocks, "this is ABnormal security procedure and it's to protect YOU, not me".
What Sutton says about UA is what applies to computershare.co.uk, BT, any bank, all utilities. The people who work there are fine enough, but the system instilled into them prevents them acting as human beings. There is a rule for everything and they have to follow it. Little wonder that improvised "helping" is blasted off the agenda.
We need a radical change to the system ooperated in big companies, one that realizes that "bigger profit" does not come from "automation" and depersonalization, from cutting costs to the bone and turning all staff into automatons. Companies that manage to get staff to take responsibility, to believe in themselves, and then get backed when they take a left-field decision to help a customer, are the companies that will make more money in the next decade. The companies hat use anything "automated" or an "IT advance" will become hated and reviled as social media becomes more powerful.
BT, UA, Facebook, the clock is ticking for you; all those companies where there are "real people who can make decisions" rather than hired employees who just follow what is directed at them from a computer screen, are going to grow in the next 20 years, and your wonderful IT-up-to-the-minute top-quality datametrics will be laughed into oblivion. Along with you. Remember Wang? Remember the word processor? Remember WordStar? That's you, that is.
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/08/united-airlines-lost-my-friends-10-year-old-daughter-and-didnt-care.html
Link to the above to read a salutary tale.
This is what happens when a company, and the system, is broken. UA won't bother to comment because I'm not NBC. But this is a set list of what dealing with big companies is like these days. Feelings of complete helplessness, despair and anger.
I had a far smaller example of this with Computershare.co.uk yesterday. My PIN would not work. I had to spend 15 minutes on the phone (an 0870 number) before I found out that the PINs "expire" after "three to six months". During the first call the man asked me for my name, then my address, then my date of birth, and then for my employer number. When I said that this was ridiculous in that I wasn't asking to be given access to the site or any confidential information, he said:
"This is just normal security procedure to protect you",
at which point I snapped and said "Bollocks, "this is ABnormal security procedure and it's to protect YOU, not me".
What Sutton says about UA is what applies to computershare.co.uk, BT, any bank, all utilities. The people who work there are fine enough, but the system instilled into them prevents them acting as human beings. There is a rule for everything and they have to follow it. Little wonder that improvised "helping" is blasted off the agenda.
We need a radical change to the system ooperated in big companies, one that realizes that "bigger profit" does not come from "automation" and depersonalization, from cutting costs to the bone and turning all staff into automatons. Companies that manage to get staff to take responsibility, to believe in themselves, and then get backed when they take a left-field decision to help a customer, are the companies that will make more money in the next decade. The companies hat use anything "automated" or an "IT advance" will become hated and reviled as social media becomes more powerful.
BT, UA, Facebook, the clock is ticking for you; all those companies where there are "real people who can make decisions" rather than hired employees who just follow what is directed at them from a computer screen, are going to grow in the next 20 years, and your wonderful IT-up-to-the-minute top-quality datametrics will be laughed into oblivion. Along with you. Remember Wang? Remember the word processor? Remember WordStar? That's you, that is.
