Hello everyone,
I was training in New Jersey last week and on my way home I got caught up in the snowstorm that closed the airport. Overnight in the airport and another two nights in an hotel until I managed to get a rescheduled flight back home. The joys of travel!
On the positive side, it gave me a chance to see first-hand how the airprort and the airline dealt with the situation and, as an exercise, to think about how it could have been improved if they had used the solution frameworks to organize themselves.
Now a modern airport is awash with technology and one could be forgiven for believing that modern technology equates to operational efficiency and indeed watching the ground-staff clearing the snow, orchestrating the movement of aircraft on the ground was an example of efficient planning that really seemed to work.
But what struck me most was, that the flow of information between the airport, the airline and the customer appeared to be seriously disjointed (I am being kind here).
No, wrong or conflicting information was the order of the day for example, we waited for nearly 3 hours for bags that never appeared only to find out that they were not going to appear and I was twice directed to the wrong queue by airline staff.
The Process framework stresses the importance of identifying all of the tasks that need to be completed and then creating process flows that ensure that there are no gaps. A key use of the process framework is that of planning for "business continuity" in the event of a major disruption.
Customer Interface Management processes identify the need to "...understand the reason for contact and directing customer contacts to the appropriate process..."
The Information framework would enable them to identify the important entities - customer, customer problem and customer interaction for example and to understand the relationship and to determine what interaction needs to take place not just during normal operations but under disruptive conditions like the snowstorm.
The lesson I took from this was, that when designing an architecture it is not enough to just plan to keep the business running on a "sunny day", the architecture needs to support all those others, external to the business but who are unfortunately impacted by any failures.
This of course, is one of the major strengths of the Solution Frameworks. The recognition that suppliers, partners, customers and other interested parties all have a part to play and that customer service has to be at the heart of any business.
Until next time "Happy Traveling!"
Andrew
Posted
03-04-2010 3:37 AM
by
Andrew Chalmers