technology management, customer focus

The revolution in communications technology has turned the truly global company from grand idea to attainable reality. Everybody now discusses the global means - including the World Wide Web and Intranets. The crescendo of publicity is not misleading; these wonders can and will make a mighty improvement to the way in which companies are managed. That improvement is vital, for globalism intensifies problems of complexity and spans of control.

Simply adding more managers is no answer. Better use must be made of the executive armies already in place. Even before their horizons became world-wide, managers had the chance to revolutionise their lives. New technology meant they could halve the time spent and misspent in gathering information, communicating, organising and meetings, each supposedly taking a fifth of their working days. The savings should all flow into a final category: thinking.

All management is the application of thought. Managers are thinkers, good or bad. They commonly see themselves as men and women of action, not ideas. But any achievement, from exploiting the opportunities of global markets to improving the response to customer enquiries and complaints, is a realised idea. The more excellent the quality of thought, the more effective management must be.

But quantity matters as well as quality. Few managers believe they deploy enough thinking hours. The savings from brilliant technology enumerated above should treble that thinking time, which assuredly hasn't happened. The reason, ironically enough, is that few companies, even among the brightest and best, globally and nationally, have given this crucial issue enough thought.

Take the quest for customer focus - stretching enough even within domestic markets. The task of overjoying customers spread around Europe, let alone the globe, is more enormous still. How do you achieve the same levels of excellent perceived service in Hanover and Hounslow? How do you obtain instantaneous, meaningful feedback from customers in Rio and Ontario? How do you ensure vital simultaneous availability of a new product in 44 different markets?

Such issues make it plain that companies need vastly more and more precise customer information. Yet researchers for the IT Management Programme were astonished to find major firms which could analyse sales and financial performance by market and product readily enough, but couldn't repeat the exercise by customer. Some 'do not know how many customers they have, let alone calculate the value of individual customers.' They simply haven't been thinking.

Thinking managers gather and communicate this information in order to separate the sheep from the goats, the profitable customers (to be loved and cherished and made more profitable still) from the unprofitable. The latter can be dropped, or (preferably) made profitable, very possibly by use of IT-based techniques for cutting the world-wide cost of sales and service; for obvious instance, the use of one-site global call centres.

Then there are invaluable techniques (also, often IT-based) for identifying and serving segmented markets. If managements aren't using these methods, again, they are failing to think. Tiny segments are now large enough to feed global businesses. One Huddersfield company, Camborne Fabrics, sells only fabrics for office furniture, but world-wide. Its systems allowed Camborne to boast a 97% level of next-day delivery to any market: it responded by investing in still better systems to exploit the profit potential of satisfying the under-served 3%.

How you use information and communications is decisive. Generally, data is now garnered and communicated faster, more accurately and in more convenient form - yet information overload and control failures abound. Electronic meetings have burgeoned rapidly, too, but without lessening the insatiable pressures for face-to-face, round-the-world contact. Similarly, few innovations have ever caught on so rapidly as fax, mobile phones, E-mail and the Web - but without easing those executive pressures.

The technology has enlarged companies' ability to reach managers on the run - in hotel rooms, airports, and their homes, on trains and on holiday. The result? One survey found that half the questioned managers couldn't escape from their work even when vacationing or sick. The fax and the mobile phone have made interruptions easier: the portable computer, with its links (now enhanced by the Web and Intranets) to data and colleagues, has made the interference more effective, but no more welcome.

The wondrous technology isn't really to blame for excessive workloads. If IT were used more effectively, the quality of managerial life would improve in practice as well as in theory. The time-saving, speed-enhancing life-style for which hard-pressed global executives yearn is within reach. The key is familiar to experts in boosting productivity through information systems, factory automation or any other application of state-of-the-art technology.

Before buying any costly hardware or software, the truly expert expert studies the processes and applies something which isn't state-of-the-art at all: common sense. That means effective thought. By eliminating whole processes and process stages, streamlining flows, relating means to redefined ends and so on, huge improvements are won intellectually before a single technological penny is invested.

Management is a system of processes. Down-sizing has often stumbled over this self-evident truth. Taking out whole layers of management, or the many managers who only act as relays in the processes, will save payroll costs. But if processes are unchanged, the remaining managers will be slumping under a heavier workload, and the whole system will begin to malfunction. Hence the current moans of shrunken companies which find that they have lost the capacity to grow profits.

Some have sought to escape stagnation by going global, only to find that unexpected costs of serving customers in far-flung and unfamiliar markets devour any prospect of profits for decades to come. Building the business and its management round its properly identified customers, wherever they may be, is entirely feasible - but only where the new electronic powers of gathering information, communicating, organising and meeting have been thoughtfully directed to proper ends. Managers who think better win the time to think better still.