Does Responsiveness Trump Efficiency?
In all the talk about globalization, budgets, and cost reductions, we tend to think that everything in business is about producing revenue and being the most efficient company (read: Low Cost) out there on the planet.
Not so, says Michael Hugos in his blog Doing Business in Real Time. He’s offered up a very thoughtful post on measuring your IT agility, which he uses to characterize ‘responsiveness.’
The article by itself is an interesting read to determine if your IT department (or YOU) are as agile as you can be in your work. In his answers to the ten ways to tell if you are agile, I found the most intriguing statements:
The major benefit of agility is to make your company more responsive to change and better able to capitalize on new opportunities as they emerge. Efficiency calls for optimizing a process to achieve lowest costs, but once a process is optimized these days, it soon becomes obsolete because prices on fuel and other goods fluctuate daily and customer demands evolve rapidly and unpredictably. Efficiency was the best way to compete in the older and slower industrial economy; responsiveness is the best way to compete in our global real-time economy. In a high change world responsiveness trumps efficiency. (Italics mine…Scot)
If responsiveness is more important than efficiency, then why have all the companies I’ve worked for been so focused on efficiency? How does one measure “responsiveness?”
I’d love to hear your views on this. I just haven’t seen the management focus on responsiveness. In my experience, efficiency has trumped responsiveness, for better or worse.
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2 opinions for Does Responsiveness Trump Efficiency?
Matthew Cornell
Jan 8, 2007 at 10:54 am
Great topic. I think these days, businesses are challenged in how responsive they are. We have customer service organizations that don’t call back, prospective employers that won’t give us the courtesy of even a “got your application - sorry, no,” etc.
FYI I wrote a related post: What’s your maximum response time?
http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2005/12/whats-your-maximum-response-time.html
Cheers!
Scot Herrick
Jan 8, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Mathew — Interesting. I was writing the post from the point of view of responsiveness to the marketplace. Think responsiveness like Apple building another iPod version.
But you are correct: there is a whole additional area for responsiveness relating to customers, employees, possible employees….more.
When is the last time you saw a company’s systems aligned to give you an answer to your customer question the first time?
More to think about…thanks for leaving the comment.
Scot
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