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Every city has a place like "Malfunction Junction." It's where 83.777% of all the accidents happen, it accounts for most of the rush hour delays, and it is a triumph of engineering over common sense. Who knew that city planners could funnel six lanes into one, then merge that lane into another six-lane highway, all within a few hundred feet?
Sound familiar? Then your city, like mine, has had some growing pains.
In fairness, the city planners and engineers are probably doing the best they can within budget and given the rate of growth. Not that that helps the Maserati that just ran under an 18 wheeler carrying 400 gallons of petroleum. But with physical infrastructure, space is a concern (we only have so much), and it pays to put a lot of forethought (city planner salary) into things before pouring resources (concrete, labor, more tax dollars) into the ground. When we're talking about business systems, the same rules don't always apply, but there are some parallels.
As strange as some Interstate junctions are, our business transactions take a more complex and often more hazardous route to their destination. One insurance policy will pass through many people (agents, underwriters, managers) a number of electronic systems (email servers, web portals, fax machines) and perhaps some physical ones (US mail, FedEx, and the like).
As a result, we have communication junctions. These are not like asphalt junctions, which go asphalt-to-asphalt. These junctions transcend planes of existence, from physical to virtual and back again. Think in terms of "Sally's desk" to "Bill's cubicle" to “the online rating system” then to "George's inbox," and so on, until we arrive finally at the long, dark tunnel that is the US Mail.
There are even time lapses that, after careful analysis, neither carrier nor MGA nor broker nor agent can accurately account for. In some circles we refer to these as “black holes,” a good term for the unresponsive people, organizations, voicemail boxes, and quoting systems of the world.
Junctions of all sorts suffer when we can't control and measure flow. With roads, we get cosmic rush hour jams and we wonder if city planners know what they're doing. With communication systems, we often don't know what we've got until enough people complain, or business drops off. Our policyholders might know better than we do how long it takes for them to get a copy of their policy. The retail agent might think coverage is bound, when in fact the MGA has implemented binding restrictions. Or, operations might think the average turnaround time is 24 hours, when agents perceive it as 72 hours. Time warp? Not likely. For the most part, these are the results of communication systems with growing pains. To alleviate these pains, look to the basics: control and measure the flow.
Let's look at how to do that. If we were talking asphalt, we would need to address “bottlenecks.” We could either route traffic through different exchanges, or widen and improve the central exchange. In all likelihood, we'll combine both approaches, just to avoid the classic Maserati-under-the-18-wheeler problem. No matter how wide we make a single point of failure, a jackknifed 18-wheeler will shut it down.
Back in the business world, we need to make sure that if “Sally's desk” no longer has a Sally to occupy it, all the information on current activities is organized and immediately picked up by someone else. Perhaps Sally just let an agent know that their policy reinstatement would be processed by morning, and they could let the insured know. If that's what happens, fine. Otherwise, we have an information fatality.
Sally is the bottleneck, and we need a routing system that immediately plugs Bill or George or Marla into the information flow. We know we need it. But do we have it, and is it as error-proof as possible. Does it depend on Sally leaving everything in order on her desk or in her email inbox?
When you can't immediately answer the question above, it represents a measurement problem. A measurement problem forces us to question any other report or statistic we come across, because we're working with assumptions. If you know exactly when a submission or transaction enters or exits the organization (not when Sally logs it in, but when it actually enters), and you can report on the data in that transaction in some basic way, you have a good ability to measure what's happening in your communication junctions. Only then can you improve the flow by addressing problem areas.
Those of us directing the engineers should keep this in mind. If our managers lose site of a communication when it passes through a junction, we deliver ourselves to the mercy of bottlenecks, dark tunnels, black holes, and time warps. The organizations that build efficient roads will continue to pull ahead of the rest. With storage, bandwidth, and processing power halving in price every 1-2 years, there is no excuse not to take a technological approach to improving communications. It's easier now than it has ever been. Remember this, and it won't be your Maserati under the 18 wheeler.
Next time I'll write about “iterative approaches” and how they can save time and avert disaster.
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