In this agile mindset and artificial intelligence era we live in, it should be unforgivable for businesses to tolerate having silos in their operations, preventing them from providing a coherent and integrated approach to managing customer expectations. By Nimroth Gwetsa, 31 July 2024.
I understand that many established organisations are large, and have different departments large enough to be stand-alone individual businesses that can compete with their equivalents in the market. In such environments, it is common to have division of labour, with some functions having the direct responsibility of interacting with clients, others providing support, some providing enabling services and others ensuring adherence to good governance and compliance with regulatory requirements.
Often, it is common in such organisations for each department to have own budget and resources, and each having specific targets to meet. In my observations throughout the years, I have never seen integration being a common high priority performance objective assigned to all to ensure that each department understands its impact and dependence on another. This explains the common pain-point in organisations where one department eager to meet customer expectations and needs is let down by others because of divergent priorities and allocation of resources. Even when the requesting department is willing to provide funds for such work to be carried out with speed by the solution supplying department, such requests are often not considered.
The inherent competitive nature of humans within an organisation tends to show up, resulting in demand not being met by supply. The reward and incentive schemes in organisations are also to blame for the prevalence of a selfish “culture” because few are willing to help others succeed when their divergent goals have not yet been met. That’s why I strongly believe enabling integration of divergent units within the organisation should be among the higher considerations for performance management. Integration must have a higher weighting assigned and significant portion of the rewards or incentives allocated to ensure its attainment and enablement.
Though I do not believe today’s culture subscribes to the bureaucratic top-down command and control approach, Chief Executives must drive integration. Inasmuch as they may require individual departments to each attain their goals for higher return of value to shareholders, coherent and integrated operations should be encouraged. It makes no sense making customers feel as if they are interacting with different businesses when engaging different departments within the organisation. Customers cannot be requested to provide the same basic information each time they interact with the organisation or other departments within the same organisation.
Ideally having the master storage of core information helps, many organisations plagued by old systems cannot use such a common repository for repeatable information. It should still be possible to build some workarounds to ensure that customers do not feel like their time is wasted, or their information is at risk of being poorly managed. It explains reasons some financial institution customers would complain that fraudsters continued transacting against their accounts even when they had already informed the bank to close transactions against their compromised accounts.
The problem is brought into sharp focus when interacting with many government entities. Sadly, customers get overwhelmed by having to provide the same information many times especially when their queries cover different problems within the same department.
Organisations should walk the talk and not have integration mainly as a buzzword punted each time executives announce financial results of their organisations. Agility and business intelligence driven operations cannot happen unless organisations get integration right!
