OK, I've had this post sat simmering for quite a while, time to get it off my chest. I recently read a white paper by Sheryl Kingstone of the Yankee Group published through InformationWeek entitled 'SMBs Must Eliminate Information Silos to Improve the Customer Experience' (registration required). It was an interesting read stressing the importance to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) of having a single source of information and fully integrated systems such that information is complete, consistent and always up to date, essentially eliminating the siloed systems where information is not linked or where information is copied but not automatically updated. Or to put it another way, your customer should be able to check out your web site to identify a product they want to buy, call your store to ensure that you have the product in stock then visit your store to make the purchase and get email support on the product and get the same information the same consistent and comprehensive service within each channel. The paper concludes (and I précis aggressively) that the majority of companies in the study do have systems that facilitate customer relationship management (CRM), the most popular being Microsoft Outlook, ACT! and salesforce.com but that in most situations these systems where not fully integrated across all channels or were under-utilized where they were available. The paper also concluded that companies that did have fully integrated and fully utilized systems realized a distinct competitive advantage.

OK great, you can't argue with statistics, my problem with the findings can be summed up with the following example. A small business, an independent retail store has set opening hours, these opening hours are posted in a number of places; on a sign on the door of the store, on the outgoing message of the answer machine attached to the store's phone, on the store's web site and of course, every employee knows. The store's owner notices that the Memorial Day holiday is quickly approaching and decides to recognize the holiday and close for the day.

Now in the manual world, the result of this decision is an additional sign is affixed to the door, the outgoing message is updated as is the website and all the staff are notified when they next report for work. I literally shuddered to think what it would cost to implement systems that would enable the update of business hours in a single place and automate the dissemination and publication of this information through the different channels, auto updating IVR systems, electronic signage displays, many thousands of dollars, absolutely absurd. What would I suggest? That the store owner writes a short document noting every thing that was changed, both before and after the holiday in enough detail that someone else could pick up the document and perform exactly the same steps come July 4^th. That this includes templates of the signs posted and verbiage used on the OGM and website and stored either in the big 'standard operating procedures' file or even online for free in the store's Office Live Workspace. To me, tearing down the silos is an admirable goal, but it doesn't replace having simple, well documented and published processes. And spending your capital dollars wisely is the best competative advantage of all.

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