Admination
Back in the good old days, I had the pleasure of starting off my career at IBM. They still made typewriters at that point. I had to walk 20 miles up hill both ways through raging blizzards to get to work, but that is another story. Back then the use of enterprise software applications was also first getting off the ground.
PROFS was the name of IBM’s version of Office. It had everything in 1981 that we expect today, but few people on the planet got to use it except for IBM employees. It was deployed across the company with great expectations of improving productivity and efficiency. Mail was sent between offices instantly. Calendars were shared electronically. It even included instant messaging across a network that would eventually become absorbed into the world wide web. (Al Gore was no where to be seen.)
There was only one problem. This software that was rolled out especially to help enable expensive managers to become more productive was only assisting their secretaries to become more productive. The managers would ask the secretaries to print out their e-mail and sort it for them. They would read it like their regular mail, waiting in a pile on their desk when they arrived in the morning. They would write notes on each page for the secretary to send a reply. This is not what the execs had in mind when they invested in the development and roll out of this leading edge killer app.
What happened next is something I talk about to this day, although it seems a bit surreal to me now. The company attempted to get rid of the role of secretary. Naturally the smarter mangers quickly learned from HR that there was a job title called Administrative Assistant. The migration of individuals between jobs was unprecedented and has never been repeated in such volumes since.
A quarter of a century later I ran into this again with a new client. This company had an interesting home grown contact management system, and another home grown system for order management, more or less. The deal makers in the field would visit a client then send everything back to their administrative assistant (where did that job title come from?) to enter into the different systems. It is kind of like CRM. It is kind of like automation. Let’s call it Admination.
These are good people. Don’t get me wrong. And they have hearts of gold and now plan to switch over to an honest CRM package. Recently we got into a conversation about who we might target as the super users. You will never guess who. 1981 flashed before my eyes.
Actually, this is not as extreme as I might be making it sound. I bet 90% of my clients have a significant percentage of the senior leadership who does not log into their CRM system. When they need a report it is produced by the sales ops specialist (some titles have changed). I’m not sure this is what was expected in the ROI studies prior to the software investment. At least they read their e-mail on their Blackberries today.