Month: July 2015

Real World Digital Transformation

/ Chris Fangmann / 4 Comments

@JDavie25 started an extremely important thread

Too many still think and act as if #Digital #Transformation topics like #IoT #Industry40 etc are pure technical topics.

#Fail !

The value resides in the intelligent combination of business & IT – well, that should be a no-brainer, but are we as IT companies, Service Providers, Consultants etc really acting on this?

There are positive examples – but still not enough. That’s one of the reasons why amongst others so many SMBs do not jump on the train yet – and are thus threatening their existence. As I once wrote somewhere: Not having access to data is bad, having access and not using it in a business appropriate way is a real waste.

We need to face it – the principles of e.g. Orchestrated Manufacturing are old, the algorithms partially exist since centuries. The real benefit comes from fast compute now being a commodity and thus everybody (theoretically) having access to it.

Whoever uses technology just for the sake of using technology will fail, whoever sells technology just for the sake of selling technology might have a quick success but no longstanding customer satisfaction journey.

One always needs to reflect the business needs and tie the use of technology to those use cases.

From high level, there are three main categories of use cases:

1) Product Improvement

2) Production improvement

3) Find a new revenue stream

First step in any exploration with a customer needs to be the agreement of where in those three categories the customer (and thus also the provider) wants to act. Never, absolutely never, do this in IT discussions – this is a business scenario where IT can (should) enable, but not lead.

Second step needs to be a real thorough #UseCase discussion. Identify a few, agree on the PoC, run it fast ( #FailFast ), reflect results and adjust. Only if one is successful with these small steps the chance for doing more comes up, so make sure to focus.

Probably all of the above is #CommonSense – so what are we missing in getting higher acceptance?

Comments welcome

/Chris

Vodafone service improving

/ Chris Fangmann / Leave a comment

It happened again. 

When I woke up Monday morning my LTE connection was down. I checked – rebooted the router a few times without success other than at one point in time the router completely stopped responding and decided to not even try to boot anymore. I had to go on a quick business trip so I let my wife know she’ll not have internet at least until I return and hit the road.

From the car I called up @Vodafone help line and got connected quite fast. Nice lady talking to me; I explained the situation and also mentioned that I had complained about the router quite a few times already but did not even get an offer to replace. While we chatted she found out that the LTE base station covering my area was dead anyway, so I’d have to wait anyway. I agreed, came back to the router topic and she literally said:

“I can’t just decide to exchange the router, but I have access to it, will do some tests and then decide on proceedings”.

I mentioned I could not imagine her having access to a router that’s a) not booting and b) can’t connect as the LTE base station is down, but she was really sure she knows her business. She promised to keep me informed shortly and we hang up.

As expected I never heard back from her.

Tuesday evening (my wife kept nagging about not having internet at home) on my way home I called up @Vodafone again. Another nice lady (and this time I really mean it). I explained the situation again, she looked up the history, told me she could not understand why her colleague did not keep me informed, promised a fast exchange of the router (she even called back about 10 min later to confirm the new router was on its way), directly did a call routing from our home number to my cell,  gave us a nice data volume on my wife’s mobile to use as mobile hotspot until the new router arrives and was in general helpful, pleasant and knew her stuff.

Needless to say the new router arrived Thursday and I was back online after of course doing my in-house adjustments.

So @Vodafone: Thanks for getting better in support – I suggest you do a new survey on customer satisfaction, have the names of the service staff in the survey and start appropriate actions after receiving the rating.

Cheers/Chris