There’s been an interesting couple of articles in the past week about Apple that hold some interesting lessons for those of us doing IT in a corporate setting. I’ll take the last first, a story in the Wall Street Journal about Apple’s successful retail stores.
I’m hardly an expert in retail sales, but one point in this story provides an important insight we can all use: “According to several employees and training manuals, sales associates are taught an unusual sales philosophy: not to sell, but rather to help customers solve problems. “Your job is to understand all of your customers’ needs—some of which they may not even realize they have,” one training manual says.” They go on to quote one employee who said, “You were never trying to close a sale. It was about finding solutions for a customer and finding their pain points.”
Frequently, even in corporate IT, there is a tendency to want to close a sale. I’ve got a tool we’re deploying, or a skill you can use. More frequently the sale is for a project – usually several. For anyone in the Business Analysis space, and I use this term somewhat broadly, a solid project portfolio is demonstrative of your value. Therefore, the point is always to have a good project list in your pocket that can be presented to senior management. This mindset runs all the way to the top. Frequently, the CIO demonstrates value to the CEO and board by having a robust portfolio of programs that IT is working on. What would happen if portfolio size was no longer much of a metric?
The challenge here is, of course, how do you measure IT effectiveness? For Apple, its straightforward – you look at the sales numbers per square foot. In a corporate IT environment, you would need to come up with both robust measurements of customer satisfaction, and then probably some good stories to share with management exemplifying this alternate approach. This is hard work, and a different way to approach IT management.
The other lessons come from an article at TechCrunch on the announcement of Apple’s iCloud offering. The focus on this article is the now famous Steve Jobs line, “it just works.” He proposes that users are generally not interested in how something works, nor are they particularly interested in having to learn a complex series of button clicks and selections, along with deciphering technical jargon, in order to make an application or system work. Some are, that is for sure, but most aren’t.
One of the fundamental challenges in many systems deployed in the life sciences industry, especially with the niche systems, is that they don’t “just work.” Interface design tends to be an afterthought, at best. Usually, the core users of the system get used to how to make it work, but many more casual users never do. I’ve seen with EDMS, with LIMS, with financial apps, with… just about everything.
If those of us responsible for implementing solutions made it a key point to ensure that the solution “just worked” at the end of the day, I wonder how much easier all of our lives would be.