Fred Mapp, former AMD CIO

Understanding your customers. I’ll begin this column with one of my favorite maxims, one you’ve heard before if you’ve been following along: "ou don’t know what you don’t know."Also important to Initiative 7 is the flip side: "ou may not know what you think you know."The point is that you can’t assume anything, especially when it comes to the level of satisfaction with your solutions and services. Too often we assume that others we associate with have a reasonable understanding of our world when, in fact, their mental picture is sketchy at best. In this initiative we will make sure we are basing nothing on assumptions. For the sake of brevity, we will focus on our internal customers in this column. But remember that the people employed by your company are but one of your constituencies. There are your channel partners, your suppliers, and the many people who pay you money in exchange for your product. You have to take the pulse of all these groups on a regular basis if you want to improve satisfaction.

It’s survey time. When was the last time you surveyed users to get their evaluation of the services you provide? If it has been more than a year, it’s time to check the pulse of your end users. It should be done regularly, and it’s particularly important to gather feedback on your efforts in the previous six initiatives. Your survey must be user friendly, so easy to fill out and return that the vast majority are completed. Make sure it’s not like the survey cards you find in hotel rooms, the kind you fill out only when you’re dissatisfied. You want your customers to complete the surveys regardless of their current level of satisfaction. An important part of the survey process is to provide results as quickly as possible and describe actions that will or will not be taken. As an example of an effective survey, we at AMD include a questionnaire at the bottom of our on-line trouble ticket to access how well problems are handled. It’s short, but it provides valuable information about the user’s experience with one of our most important services.

Let’s take a look at the poll numbers. Why should you survey? At one of my communication meetings I asked my organization to estimate the satisfaction level of our end users. The answers ranged from 85% to 100%. We did a survey a few months later and about 40% of the respondents said we were terrific. But another 45% were on the fence. The remaining 15% were in serious need of TLC. After all we’ve done, after all the progress we’ve made, these numbers caused surprise and more than a little consternation. A lot of my people wondered what we’d done wrong. After reviewing the survey results and write-in comments, the short answer was that we hadn’t fully educated our users on our business value and our total services. They knew of our existence, that we spend a lot of money, but they wanted IT to better understand and support their business needs and improve communication. Other areas of concern were to improve responsiveness and timeliness. What we did was to focus on that 45% to get them satisfied and of course keep the existing 40% happy and get the survey to 85%. We are looking forward to the results of the next survey.

Polls show just a part of the picture. You should always have your feelers out. Careful, regular polling is but one part of the solution. A seat at the table - actually seats at all the tables of power in your organization - is another part. Customer expectation interviews and feedback sessions gather valuable information. Relationship managers and account managers all help you keep tabs on your business partners and customers. And informal talks with people in all the various levels of your organization can also prove invaluable. In a previous initiative I mentioned the "sticky note count"I use to judge the efficiency and satisfaction of our software rollouts. There are many such methods for gauging success and satisfaction.

IT, sell thyself. You must constantly market IT. By "market"I mean you must communicate with your customers and put yourself, your efforts, and your strategy in the most visible light possible. Be open to all avenues of feedback. Don’t be defensive. Be humble. If you by chance you make a mistake, admit it and try to make it better. If you have a chance to celebrate something you’ve done well, share the joy and don’t assume everyone will know about it. If you have a chance to educate and demonstrate a new technology or application, reach as many of your customers as you can. It doesn’t have to be complex. As an example, we set up demonstrations in the cafeteria a few months ago for the new notebook we planned to transition to. It generated a lot of good and will smooth the transition considerably.

The tip of the iceberg. I hope the information I’ve shared in these seven columns has been of some value. This has been a challenging process for me in the sense that the volume of information I would like to convey far exceeds the space available in these seven columns. IT is an enormously complex topic with many nuances and variations from industry to industry and organization to organization. We’ve discussed many aspects of IT, but there is much more to do.

In closing, then, I must ask you to remember that this is a never-ending effort. We’ve put a lot of processes in place that demand continuous use and improvement. We’ve made huge strides, we’ve learned a lot, and moved closer to perfection. Perfection can never be obtained, however, so our striving must always continue.

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