Solve For A Different Problem

I've been wracking my brain for a billion dollar idea for 20 years and if I had succeeded to date I would be writing this from my own island or mountain top cabin.

But I can tell you what one looks like. 

I started my career at Symbol Technologies in Bohemia NY. In the late 1980's the race was on to create hand held bar code scanners. The larger grocery store barcode scanners were established in quickly recognizing price, product and stock levels, but the situations where you needed to bring the scanner to the product, pallet or trucking container had huge efficiency and quality implications in retail, warehousing and logistical operations.

Most companies were working on trying to reduce the size of the motors so that they could fit in a hand held scanner. The motor is necessary to move the red light (illumination system) back and forth so that the sensor can capture the visual image and the decoder can double check the code and turn it into text or information.

Jerry Schwartz, the co-founder of Symbol, asked his team if creating a smaller motor was the answer. "What would a solution be if we didn't use a motor?" he asked. That was a different problem. The answer to the different problem turned into a piece of flexible Mylar, a LED and a magnet that when turned on and off flexed the Mylar and moved the red light.

Hence the billion.

The Service Organization Challenge

Many service organizations are trying to improve the way they coordinate, deliver and measure their services. At Good Sign, we are thinking about what types of services you shouldn't have to manually execute at all.

Companies re-evaluating their transformational initiatives are driven by necessity. Just a few of them include:

• instant cloud capacity with its ability to expand resources
• consumer software methods being applied to corporate users and customers
• the changing landscape of security requiring thinking beyond the historical corporate border as data resides on iPhones, tablets, cloud and beyond
• and the new IT buyers driven by the unbundling of IT

Shvetank Shah, executive director at the advisory services firm Corporate Executive Board, talks about enterprise architects working for strategy, IT audit for finance, and PMO residing under the CEO or COO.

So what types of service transformations can emerge out of opportunity?

Good Sign's philosophy is the following: We think any service chain where personal human interaction is non-value-add, where the process can be made explicit, and where costs can be lowered and quality increased are prime candidates for solving different problems. 

A simpler rule of thumb: What a customer says is not always what they mean so know when your customer wants to talk about it, doesn't want to talk about and when they just want the job done.

Don’t Let Structural Complexity Fool You

It's there to be solved. Complex company structures and value chains are not disqualifiers in automating or improving asset management, user account activations and deactivations, service provisioning, billing rules and the actual mediation and billing.

Each business is different, but the evolution of service management demands new solutions, different solutions and the need for speed.

We need to solve for a different problem - in the end we can find so much more.