Here is a scene from an old movie, the manager is sitting in his large office, not a single piece of paper on his clean and shiny desk, his good looking secretary (now known as PA) knocks on the door and enters with a folder in her hand. She puts it politely in front of the manager who takes his expensive pen and starts signing letters. The next scene usually has the manager confidently dictating a letter, the secretary probably using shorthand (if you do not know what that is never mind keep on reading) to note down what her boss is saying before she goes back to her desk to type the letter!

A stark contrast from today’s self serving modern manager who types his own email messages, dials his own calls and uses self service web based applications to claim his travel expenses and even book his own flights. Recently, I used a website to design, create, proof read, order and pay for my own business cards from a company half a world away totally in self service. The cards arrived two weeks later in the mail with a polite thank you note and by the way, I paid less than half the going local price for business cards.

“The internet changes everything” that is what Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief said more than ten years ago as he unveiled Oracle8i, one of Oracle’s flagship products.  He was absolutely right. The internet, like the power grid has opened the door for many innovative people and companies to introduce ground breaking solutions for our increasingly difficult day to day lives.

In my view, one of the most important internet enabled changes in our lives is the whole idea of self service. Self service for airline customers to design their own travel itineraries, for Ayman to order his own business cards, or for Mark who is using the web to locate a Windows Vista compatible driver for his old HP printer. They all go to the worldwide web, look for what they need, get it done in a relatively short time and avoid calling useless help desks and being put on hold for hours.

Self-service gives customers the immediate response they seek when attempting to process a request or resolve an issue. It also crucially reduces the operational costs associated with traditional face-to-face or phone interaction. Despite the best efforts of many companies, some customers remain attached to telephone and face-to-face interaction, particularly when they have a complaint about a product or service. This adds significant costs to running any business. According to Forrester Research, telephone-based customer service costs over $30 per transaction; by contrast web-based self-service costs just over $1 per transaction. But you all know that the trend is very solid, younger generations are much more comfortable with the web and have no time for a visit to the bank or the mobile phone company.

Naturally, web self-service falls into a number of categories. Content-based services focus on inquiries that can be fulfilled with static information, such as the “frequently asked questions". More advanced self-service applications use case-based reasoning and track relationships between customer inquiries and the information needed to satisfy them. And thirdly transaction-based services include services such as placing orders, filling out applications, updating customer information and making payments. To conduct transactions and obtain customer-specific information, Web self-service systems must fully integrate with enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP or other operational systems.

But customer service is not the only form of self service, I want to make the case (again?) for self service applications used inside the enterprise for example, applying for leave, raising a purchase requisition, updating your own HR record, doing your own performance appraisal or raising a support ticket to activate the synchronization with your new Blackberry!

 Of course this means that your enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications are designed, implemented and deployed to support self service applications and are backed by a powerful workflow engine that acts upon each request by routing it within the company based on a predefined process flow.

 Let us take the unlikely example of applying for a salary increase for one of your high performance employees. Without self service, this usually turns into a chain of email messages seeking approvals from a number of company executives often missing the right ones, not getting the order of approvals right and not surprisingly having your request turned down.

 Now let us follow the sequence of events in a well designed self service environment, you log on to your company’s portal, you go to the human resources tab, you click on salary reviews, you select the employee from a drop down menu, a new screen opens with pre populated details of the employee, his previous performance reviews, current salary, previous salary and the date of his last salary change, you enter the new salary, you are prompted to enter the justification, you click submit. The workflow figures out who needs to approve this request and in what sequence, it thanks you for using the system and displays the list of approvers. Approvers get email notifications that a request is waiting for their approvals, they review your request, they may ask for more information, reject, or approve and pass it to the next approver … all in the workflow system that notifies you every time the status of your request changes. And finally when all the approvers give their OK, the workflow itself changes the salary of your hardworking employee in the HR system. It is not subject to data entry errors, or subjective discussions!

 Similar examples are numerous but the benefits are the same:

·          A standardized business process for each type of transaction

·          You focus on what you need to do instead of understanding who should approve what or when

·          You are always kept up to date with the progress of your request

·          You do not have to struggle with messy email chains

·          You save your time and the company saves money

·          The company can measure the span of time each type of request takes in order to be completed and may tune the process accordingly

Enterprise self service applications offer great return on investment but are often ignored within ERP projects or considered “Phase II”. Don’t let that happen to you; don’t miss out on the added value offered by self service!