Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
Companies which achieve success in growing service often do so in spite of their technology rather than because of it. A lack of integration in both process and technology leave people isolated in departmental silos and stunt growth. Steve Downton argues integration must be the centre of attention.
The thrust for many businesses has turned towards improving Service where there is a promise of increasing margins. Many of these companies however have little or no investment in technology to support their service organisation. The people in the operation responsible for success in growing service quite often succeed in spite of the existing (legacy) systems, not because of them!
Integration across a business is becoming the centre of attention as it becomes obvious that growth will be difficult to engineer. Historically businesses have been focused on performing well, function by function, resulting in the creation of silos, and even some parts of the business working at odds with others. Research indicates that almost two-thirds of businesses struggle to integrate the service business with other company systems that were never designed to interface with sophisticated service solutions: the resulting information flow is at best hybridised; at worse requiring to be re-entered onto the second system (double keyed).
As the service environment has become more sophisticated and complex, this lack of integration has often been the root cause of problems such as SLAs being sold that are almost impossible to achieve, or new products sold when secrecy has kept the Service operation in the dark, as well as business rivals. A lack of "joined-up" operation is often the main cause why businesses seem to grow quite quickly only to fall back at a certain stage.
This article is accessible for registered visitors only.
You can register here
Registered users can tell Noventum about which subjects they would like to receive email.
Without previous permission data will not be used by others.
