Efecte Blog

Stinkies from the Moomin board game.

I watched my kid play Moomin board game the other day. He had removed all the Stinkies from the game that could potentially lower his score in the end, and got huge points in the game. Ingenious.

He was (unknowingly, I have to admit) following Finland’s State IT Director and CIO Yrjö Benson’s guideline for IT projects: “The best eGovernment initiatives are not the ones where the traditional services are put online, but the ones where the services are made completely obsolete or significantly simpler”. He referred to the tax return form filing process that was made completely obsolete for most citizens. They tweaked the whole game.

So how does this apply to your organization?

I was recently involved in a customer project for providing ICT services online for internal users. The project was a huge success because:

1. Customer had the courage to greatly reduce the amount of software, types of workstations, types of printers, types of accessories available etc, which simplified the ordering for end users and request handling for ICT personnel.
2. They eliminated unnecessary steps in the process by completely bypassing first line support for service requests that can’t be handled there anyway. They reduced options in printing services because it became cheaper to provide the better alternative as a standard. Now they a) don’t spend time on the phone explaining the customer all the options and what it means, b) number of mistakes in the orders dropped and c) there are fewer configurations to maintain.
3.  They got rid of many unnecessary forms and drastically simplified the rest

The result? End users love it. Delivery is faster. Costs are lower.

Get rid of Stinkies in your organization. Tweak the game for your end users.