InformationWeek

The Secret CIO: When Everyone's A 'Customer'

Quality seemed like a good idea until it was co-opted by executives

By Herbert W. Lovelace
Issue column appeared: Jan. 22, 1996

I'm sitting at my desk working on the Quality Plan. Quality is big in the company this year, right up there with reengineering. Now I've got to include a section on how we are going to better serve our internal customers. This task is difficult, because I have an emotional problem with the concept of internal customers. I'm all for providing good service and fixing eve rything that needs fixing. I even act polite to that little dweeb, Kratmeyer, who's in charge of international operations.

What causes my mental block is that I believe the only customers who count are those whose names appear in our order entry and accounts receivable systems. I don't want to take anything away from the folks who toil at headquarters, but I doubt if anyone buys our products because of them. I mean, when was the last time you bought something because you liked the manufacturer's financial analysis group?

Quality got started in our company when some people in our plants took the initiative to work together so they could keep a collective straight face when promising real customers we would do what they pay us to do. It seemed like a good thing: Orders got out faster and returns decreased.

Striving For Parity
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line it was decided that what could be done by the workers could be improved by the corporate staff. Like strivin g for parity in the arms race, we appointed a VP of Quality, who immediately hired two assistants and spent the next six months visiting other firms' VPs of Quality.

Then came the motivational speeches. The keynote came at a management meeting where guru Tom Peters gave a rambling talk, pacing back and forth in front of us like a disjointed metronome, about how we have to reinvent ourselves. I figure that talk alone cost more than the annual merit budget for all of my systems programmers and telecommunications staff combined.

Mandatory training was then decreed and we learned that we all have internal customers. The key mental step, I gathered, was that if satisfying one customer is good, calling each other "customer" allows everyone to feel empowered and part of the new great leap forward. Sort of like Neil Armstrong announcing, on stepping onto the moon, "One small step for quality, one giant leap for bureaucracy."

Initially, the only impact was a shortage of c onference rooms while internal customers met to discuss the value of their jobs to the company. But that soon changed with the edict that each department should generate a quality plan. Guidelines were issued and everybody, including the people in the plants who had started the whole thing and were actually getting results, had to write up their work in the approved company format for a corporate committee to critique.

I've been working here long enough to have learned never to underestimate the organization's ability to turn all ideas into a vehicle for enhancing self-importance. I can live with that even if the rank and file have had their ideas co-opted and replaced with platitudes. After all, that's life in a big corporation.

But I have difficulty figuring out how to satisfy all these internal customers with our Quality Plan while simultaneously reengineering the processes these same "customers" guard so zealously as their own turf. If everyone is an internal customer to be sat isfied, how do we get them to give up chunks of their empires in the name of reengineering? Maybe we need another speech to explain it.

Comments on this story?

InformationWeek http://techweb.cmp.com/iw