|
Wednesday, June 19, 2002 |
A day in the life: what business are we in?
good discussion with my coworker Gary this morning. There's a matrix in business of "high vs. low tech" and "high vs. low touch". The "high tech" is in the perception of the end user (a DVD player has a lot of technology in it, but a school kid can grab the remote and use it: to the consumer, this is a low tech device). The "touch" is how much contact you need with a company representative. People who use this model make the point that it's very hard for a business to be successful in more than one quadrant at a time.IBM is a classic high touch, high tech company: you buy complex stuff from them and they send along people who make it all work. The IBM spinoff, Lexmark, is a low touch, low tech company: they make printers for your desktop, and sincerely hope to never talk to you at all (one help desk call probably chews up the entire profit margin on the sale of an inkjet printer). When Digital was the favorite company of techies everywhere, they were in a high tech, low touch business. They were the vendor of choice for scientists and engineers who wanted to get the equipment at a good price, and were willing to deal with complexity on their own, without the intermediary of a DEC onsite consultant. (You might think there is no low tech, high touch quadrant, but think of buying a house from an agent: the hours they spend forming a relationship with you is a classic high touch approach to a low tech market).
The problem with being in central IT is that different people want you to be in different businesses. Our retail operation sells Palms and Apple iPods and boxes of MS Office, and they need to be efficient at inventory management and service; cash register and web-based sales is low touch, low tech. In the next room, you can talk to our people who will help you sort out a custom PC configuration on the manufacturer's site, which is high touch, high tech; they'll also make sure you get the right cable for your printer, which is rapidly becoming a high touch, low tech issue. Other people view our job as one of stocking lots of obscure parts and boards and reselling them at a cheap price, a high tech, low touch relationship. My own job is often high tech, high touch; I'm there to handle complexity in IT for people whose main job is not to "do technology".
I'm not going to argue that our problems would be over if we just tossed three of the four business quadrants; for starters, we're not an independent company that can make these decisions, and I doubt that our stakeholders (campus) is going to want us to radically change any time soon. But understanding these different styles of business have helped me to understand some of the issues that arise in trying to get different units to work together: we may all have the same boss, but we are not all in the same line of work, and until we recognize our differences we cannot address them.
