Chairs With Wheels

A former colleague once told me a story that I think of whenever in a discussion of investing in technology to solve business problems…

Long ago (circa early 90's) he was pitching a consulting project to a major telco. The telco had put out an RFP to various development shops asking for help solving a classic problem — they had a number of different systems for billing, provisioning, customer service, etc. Their customer reps would have to physically go to different terminals to deal with different aspects of the support process, causing a lot of inconvenience and wasted time.

Of course, all of the proposals that came back talked about various ways to integrate the systems using then state-of-the-art enterprise software techniques, and, of course, all of those proposals were quite hefty in terms of time and cost. My friend submitted his proposal and waited to hear back.

After a couple of weeks the telco got back to him — he did not land the project, but not because some other shop had beat him out. Instead, the telco told him that they had bought all of the customer reps chairs with wheels on them, making it much easier for them to move among the various terminals, so they no longer considered it a burning problem.

True or not (the guy who told me this story swore it was true) this parable always helps frame technology investment decisions for me. When tackling hard problems, I always look to see if you can find a “Chairs With Wheels” solution before (or, in many cases, while) investing in the automated solution.