Howard Cunningham vs. Monkey: Round 2

Most of you remember the Howard Cunningham feature in Shockey Monkey. Howard is a good friend from DC (Macro LLC) and always full of great ideas about the time value of money and getting the most out of your monkeys.

Last year at the Microsoft WPC keynote by Kevin Turner, or as will now go down in infamy as the “infrastructure flush heard around the world”, it became clear that for OWN to compete in the new world we need to be better, quicker and more standardized than the other guys chasing ads.

That means as a service company, we had to adopt ITIL and really drive down how we define the process of service delivery (you can read about that in my book). But I’m not just writing it to make Karl rich, it really is a blueprint to a service delivery model that you’re going to have to play by or go extinct.

When I looked at how we go from where we were, to where we need to be, I knew that my biggest value is in the time my people spend to render services. We needed something spectacular, quick and as fast as we are. We need to be as responsive to situations as IM. So here is what you know so far:

Nice inline components that slide in and out of view when they are needed. No screen clutter, no massive refreshes, no popup windows, no wasted resource anywhere.

But then we throw Howard Cunninham into it.

Every ticket listing has an AJAX info bubble which you can roll over to see the last few updates. The rows get highlighted when they are updated between your page refreshes, and we can quickly act on them by previewing and tagging them.

Nothing like taking less than 5 seconds to review 3 tickets.

But let’s say that a support request update is something quick.

Something simple. Like “Did you reboot?”, “Whats the password”, “Have you tried this?”

Should a user be forced to load up an entire new page with all the assemblies, control panels and a page with more options than what they use to launch the f’n shuttle into the space?

What if it’s just a oneliner update, that shouldn’t use up extra resources, shouldn’t take up more bandwidth, should just be on demand and quick?

You’ve quessed it. Hit the Q for Howard Cunningham Quick Update!

Type in your update:

Quick options to make the support request update not send more email, not show up in the customer view or even close it out completely.

Update ticket. Done.

We can do this all day, no time wasted, no resources wasted. I feel like my computer has a little stroke every time I touch Outlook – now I don’t have to rely on Outlook. Heck, I don’t even have to rely on a computer, I can do this from the back of a data center, from a Kiosk, from an iPhone.

But don’t you worry about… No, I got AuthAnvil integrated baby. Oh, you give your customers Administrator password to a bucket of indians not even fit to work for PSS phone shields?

That is my differentiating factor. Enterprise software, enterprise infrastructure, talented staff in the new world and not a pile of monkeys with some degenerate CRM doing the needful and learning English one kb guess at a time. The world is changing, this is what I’m doing to remain on the top.

Consolidate yourself out of business… or Take the red pill, stay in wonderland, and I’ll show you how deep the monkey hole goes.

Where do you want to go today?