John Linton ...perhaps because my schooling, from a very early age, continued to emphasise that copying anything anyone else did was a pointless way of investing anyone's personal time and effort. I read this article earlier this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304584004576415940086842866.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RIGHTTopCarousel_1
which exemplified how 'sameness' has become more and more prevalent than perhaps it has ever been in the sad history of the human race....and I read this article immediately after:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/telstra-calls-on-master-of-robotics-to-rewire-its-malfunctioning-internet-home-page/story-e6frg906-1226085934554
which I was aware of based on Telstra's previous announcement that they were going to try to lift the number of transactions done on line from the pitifully low number currently. I think I commented at the time that it seemed amazing that the company that has dominated the communications industry for the whole of its existence should rank as, probably, the user of the least amount of the communications technology it provides to its customers.
I read both of these articles shortly after I had been looking at our competitors web sites as I generally do at this time of the week. I was struck by the close similarities between the five communication provider sites I looked at and realised that if you removed the logos and company names you would be hard put to determine which company was which based on the product offerings. Sameness doesn't quite do it.
It was a timely reminder to me that I have done very little, in real terms absolutely nothing, over the past two years to hasten the development of new automation processes for Exetel and I have contributed to no real web site changes/increases in function (main, user, supplier) for at least that long - which is a terrible indictment of a senior manager within a communications company. While we have continued to use our customer's suggestions to correct minor failings or provide small improvements no-one within Exetel has been able to take any sort of 'leap forward' in terms of adding significant new functions. From before the day we started we had put in place the beginning of what would become an iterative process to automate everything that could be automated and to open as many channels between our customers and our possible future customers as we could think of. Over the past two plus years we haven't done anything.
There are obviously many reasons for that lack of development - one of them being that we almost certainly achieved after five years of continuous effort, a level of automation that went far further than any other commercial and residential Australian provider. That would be some sort of 'contributor', but the real reason is that we have been buried under the daily burdens of surviving Telstra Retail's thirty month assault on its competitors (which includes Exetel as collateral damage) and that 'distraction' allowed the constant progress on developing our web sites to fall away in terms of daily importance and eventually get no attention at all. When I did a qad comparison an hour or so ago I can see that Exetel's levels of automation are still as good or better (in some cases much better) than the companies I looked at - which was some comfort.
Perhaps, assuming I am right in predicting that the coming year will be a little less difficult that the past three years, we will now have the time and the resources to re-build our web sites and, more importantly the functionality that is embedded within them and the processes associated with them....including the processes that require human intervention whenever that is the case. I remember when this was a significant part of my working day but that was a long time ago now and that is a striking condemnation of both me and other people at Exetel. Whether business life is in fact going to get easier over the coming months or not it is essential that we go back to improving and adding to our on line transaction processing systems.
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