Simple Change Saves and Costs a Fortune

I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the little things that make life simpler in tiny little ways, and also all of the things that do the reverse.

A few weeks back my employer changed the default policy for attachment forwarding. In the past email was forwarded with attachments by default, now it’s forwarded with the attachment stripped out. It was a really simple change, I even read about it in the communication material. The business justification was quite simple – save on some storage. I’m sure we were using lots of storage that we didn’t need to use because of redundant attachments floating around the place.

A nice sound direct cost reduction opportunity, who could argue with that.

I’ve been using (and support) email systems since they weren’t capable of handling attachments. All of that time attachments have been forwarded by default. If someone sends me something and I know that someone else needs to see it – I forward it, all of it. It’s obvious.

And there in lies that challenge – a direct cost reduction opportunity v my expectation.

I have already lost count of the number of times I have had to resend something that I forgot to send “with attachment”. I know that the default has changed – but I can’t make the change in my working practice. The cost of these mistakes is huge, it’s not just my time resending the item, it’s the time of the people who receive the denuded email. They have the thankless task of trying to get back in contact with me so I can send them something that they can use.

The other day I watched Emily struggling with cut and paste. I showed her how to use ctrl+x, ctrl+c and ctrl+v. She can’t get over how much easier it is for her to use. I thought about the amount of time she was wasting and wondered about the people using the 1 million+ desktop devices that we look after as an organisation.

I’ve recently been involved with a customer who was suffering from performance problems. One particular senior person was suffering the worst. An engineer looked at the contents of the device and noticed running software to synchronise to just about every hand-held device that has ever been produced. This person only uses a BlackBerry and don’t synch it with their laptop, they synch over the air.

It’s been an issue in the industry for a very long time – how to make people efficient. We don’t seem to be any further on. I suspect that I could save an organisation millions, and make a lot of people very happy by giving them small amounts of efficiency coaching.

One of the ways that we normally measure efficiency is to measure something and then improve it. But even there we don’t seem to be in a good shape. I’d quite like to be able to measure who long it take an application to start across an organisation – but there are scant tools available. I’d quite like to be able to measure how long it takes a desktop device to start-up and become usable – again, scant help tools available. As we are moving beyond reliability being our biggest issue, perhaps we’ll start to focus our attention on performance, real end user performance.

We definitely need to start assessing changes on the basis of overall end user cost, as a minimum. This should be offset against the direct cost savings.