Chairs with Wheels
A new colleague of mine recently told me a story that I had to capture here because it so perfectly illustrates the nature of business decisions relative to technology.
Several years back he was pitching a big consulting project to a major telco. The telco had put out an RFP to various development shops asking for help solving a major pain point — they had a number of different systems for billing, provisioning, customer service, etc. Their customer reps would have to physically go to different terminals to deal with different aspects of the support process, causing a lot of inconvenience and wasted time.
Of course, all of the proposals that came back talked about various ways to integrate the systems using the then state-of-the-art enterprise software techniques, and, of course, all of those proposals were quite hefty in terms of time and cost. My friend submitted his response to the RFP and waited to hear back for a couple weeks.
Finally, the call came - he did not land the project, but not because some other shop had beat him out. No, you see the telco told him that they had bought all of the customer reps chairs with wheels on them, making it much easier for them to move among the various terminals, so they no longer considered it a burning problem.
I have no idea if this is really a true story (though, the guy who told me about it swears it is), and I’m sure eventually this company took some major steps to integrate the systems more formally. But, for me this parable has quickly become a very useful short-hand for helping to put all technology decisions into perspective. When tackling hard problems, always look to see if you can find a “Chairs With Wheels” solution before (or, in may cases, while) investing in technology solutions.