Office Speak: One Stop Shop

Let’s take this one apart:

• One Stop – the only place you need to go
• Shop – where you get whatever you need

Brilliant – the only place I need to go to get whatever I need. Do I need to say more? Well…

Unfortunately, in office speak, the billing of these projects rarely meets the title.

The one stop shop reporting solution is great for certain types of reporting, but not great for others.

The one stop shop procurement solution is great until you want to procure something that wasn’t thought of by the procurement team.

I’ve been hearing this term for more than 20 years, probably 30 years. According to Google its heyday was in the early 2000s, so it’s been around a while. The things is, though, I can’t honestly think of a time when the promise has been delivered. That’s not a criticism, it’s meant as an acknowledgement of reality and the reality is people don’t want a one stop shop, their needs are rarely that simple.

Even Amazon isn’t really a one stop shop, it carries literally millions of different items, but even so, there will be times in your life when you will shop somewhere other than Amazon. There are times when what isn’t available on Amazon.

The one stop shop knowledge system is fine as long as your knowledge can be consumed by the system.

The one stop shop quality management system carries all the processes that the business follows, apart from the many informal processes that make the organisation work.

The other One Stop Shop that I’ve seen is the one that is so narrow in its scope as to make the term meaningless – “this is the one stop shop request system for my team of 5 people” or “this is the one stop shop reporting capability for the data held in this single tool.”

The great thing about most organisations is that there are so many one stop shops to choose from.

This is another one of those terms that has been through the full concept entropy cycle and now has little more than a background temperature value.

On a more possitive note; the One Stop Shop likely does carry the things that most people want, or most people are happy with, but they rarely cover the specific or the specialist. You might argue that the specific and the specialist isn’t important, but that’s often where the higher value is. Why isn’t there a one stop shop for clothes? Or one for watches?

Honestly, I’d rather people didn’t use the term, but I understand why they do. It’s a way of indicating to people that this is the place where you should start and probably has what you are looking for, I concede that “The Probably Have What You Are Looking for Shop” doesn’t sound anything like as snappy, perhaps they should be “Start Here Shops.”

The term has been with us for a long time, and I doubt it’s going to go anywhere soon.

Header Image: This is Raven Crag that sits at the end of Thirlmere on a day when we enjoyed the first snows of the season. Unfortunately, many others got caught in the same snow and had to spend the night in church halls and cafes while the roads were cleared.