The 10 Greatest Mistakes Executives Make When Changing systems

What do they do? They research alternatives. They scour the Internet, they get information, brochures, proposals. They call vendors who visit them and submit even more proposals. They examine what they've received and try to make a decision and find they can't.  It's wrong. And it's backwards. And here's why.

There are really two subjects here, both worth discussing.

The concept of what you really need vs. what you might think you need or want is treated in All you Really Need To Know About Telecom.

The topic Not Solutions -- Results is treated extensively in the article "The Teleconvergence Approach", offered here in its entirety.

...rather than as potential platforms to be used to build strategic advantages. The days when telephone systems were good only for making or receiving phone calls ended about the same time as as financial information was of use only to accountants.  Today's telecom systems are thinly disguised computers designed as platforms to realize strategic initiatives such as CRM, supply chain coordination,  virtual presences and telepresences, and multilingual and multicultural efforts that support your company's future direction.

Today's communications are mere solutions only if someone is not asking the right questions. That's something Teleconvergence has been doing for more than thirty years. Doesn't it seem reasonable that working together we can find the right answers for you as well?

The following text is from the article "The Essential Questions": 

As we say repeatedly, but cannot say often enough, every vendor has a specific product evolution and migration strategy that is theirs and theirs alone.  Even if their products are a perfect fit for your needs today, those products will change and become obsolete according to the vendor's needs, not its customers.  And since any product's evolution will inevitably diverge from your company's own evolution, the probability that any vendor's strategic direction and destination will be the same as yours is exactly Zero.

They ignore relative employee sophistication, employee intellectual capital and capabilities, and especially how their employee mix may be changing over time: are employees becoming more or less sophisticated, more multilingual, more stretched, better educated, meeting more demands in less time with fewer people, etc.

Unless you fully understand your current and future requirements and can spell them out clearly for all potential vendors in vendor and technology-agnostic terms, you will fall prey to recommendations for solutions that work -- but that also may not work for your company.  You can read about it in the article about Telephone System Dos and Don'ts, but we suggest you finish this list and, when you've finished this entire section on what we do regarding telecom system change, then you turn to the section on how we do it in The Teleconvergence Approach to System Selection.

All too often, companies ignore their relationships with customers and suppliers, missing opportunities to tie their systems and interests closer to those of their strategic partners.  They fail to consider what communications tools their sales force could use to increase efficiency and effectiveness and how those tools might be extended beneficially throughout their supply chain. In a world of increasing globalization and commodization of relationships, they don't consider how to raise their value to others by offering services derived from their new platforms, whether on a profit center basis or not.

They limit themselves to their existing, often old, often decades-old definition of their business and their competitive position in their supply chain, as if their competitors were tacitly accepting the status quo as well.  The concept of making yourself invaluable to the companies you value extends well beyond basic telecom.  Later, when you finish this section, either before or after you go on to our Strategic options (our methodologies),  you might want to look over a most relevant small series of articles in the section called Telecom Risk Management .  It not only discusses how to protect your company in the face of adversity, but also how to extend that newfound capability to others, perhaps even making some money – as well as new friends – in the process.

By ignoring demographic, technological, and societal trends and their potential impact on the organization's direction and future, they may be proceeding but are doing so blindly.  They may be making a technological decision, but too often they fail to consider how technological change is affecting their industry and how demographic changes should be incorporated into their system decisions. 

For example, if a significant portion of their future customer base will speak a language other than English as its primary language, what is being done to support that in the new system?  Similarly, is  the company prepared to support the influx of employees that must communicate in those languages as part of their daily tasks? How will the company cope as the number of non-English-speaking customers grow faster than the non-English speaking number of employees?  Technology can help immensely, but only if the right solutions are included in the new system's requirements.  For more on this, please look at the Teleconvergence Approach to System Selection, especially the articles that detail how our process incorporates these variables, virtually ensuring that future needs will be successfully anticipated.

This simply reflects the cumulative effect of sequential short-term solutions to erroneously perceived discrete problems.  These are the same problems that now cause to you seek another system, the same problems that will simply reappear later. What should you do about it? Start by reading The Teleconvergence Approach. If you like our perspective, you may want want us to look over your situation.

This is a major reason that new systems usually fall far short of their promise and why they are replaced by "more "efficient" ones without ever first actually being obsolete or outgrown.  And why the "new, improved system" itself gets replaced in only as few years, perpetuating the cycle indefinitely.  Part of the reason reflects the surprisingly significant discrepancy between, for example, job descriptions and actual job behavior, just as it reflects the (usually largely unknown to management) difference between formal procedures and actual processes.

The reasons for and implications of all this are discussed in the section on Procedural Strip Mining, (PSM) the low-end Teleconvergence business analysis version of Business process Review. To the degree that productivity is improved, any new system will reflect that improvement. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. PSM is an inexpensive way to put the odds in your favor.

Management too often sees telecom only as a technology that connects systems and users. Teleconvergence, on the other hand, views communications as something that uses technology to achieve personal, interpersonal, and business objectives on behalf of employees and business partners.

It's a fact that systems never know who's using them.  But Teleconvergence believes that properly created systems and processes create cohesiveness within and among business units by effectively formalizing the importance of the rich non-dotted line relationships among individuals that make great companies successful. If you think this perspective might be useful to you in selecting your next system, why not use your current one to call us and arrange for a free consultation?