February 2004
Volume 20
Number 2
Why Your Users Prefer Disney World to IT
Howard Strauss, Princeton University
A family trip to Disney World is very expensive. An Ultimate Park Hopper® one-day advance purchase for four people ten-years-old and above was $476 on the web in January 2004. That doesn’t include airfare, pricey hotels, expensive meals, and the trinkets kids will demand. It does include long lines, crowds, the joy of two trips through airport security, and possibly the subtropical summer climate of Florida. Yet people flock to Disney World again and again. Many of your users are happily among them.
If Disney raises its prices, their guests reach for their wallets. If an IT department raises its prices, their users reach for their phones and e-mail programs to protest. If a critical Disney ride is down for a day, their guests move onto the next ride. If your e-mail system is down for ten minutes, your user-support phones start ringing off the hook and nasty voicemail gets sent to your CIO. On some days an IT department would rather be at Disney World or even running it. While your Board of Trustees would be unlikely to approve that, if you start doing things more like Disney World, your users will probably respond in kind.
Charging
At Disney World the price of admission provides unlimited access to
all rides and events. The parts are not sold separately. Once in the park
you do what you want based upon your
needs. You could ride Space Mountain all day, avoid any line longer
than ten minutes or go on no rides at all. Your children are never told,
“We’d have to buy more tickets for that ride” or “We’ve used up
all the tickets. We have to go home.” Once you opt in, money does not
force you to do things that would be bad for the park or for you.
Disney’s guests adore the one price of admission. Once they get by the
pain of paying it, the rest of their stay is focused on enjoying the
services Disney World has to offer.
It would be best if IT departments did no charging at all. Most school libraries charge nothing beyond overdue-book fines. Charging for using the library would only discourage its use to the detriment of the mission of the university. Not charging would be the best model for IT departments. If that is not possible, a periodic one price opt-in for IT service makes the most sense. Once paid, departments or individuals would get all the IT services they need. This will not require infinite resources. In many cases it will be good enough to have your users allocate the resources you offer based upon their needs. When IT resources need to be allocated, use a high-level team of primarily non-IT people to make those critical decisions. Today those same resources are often allocated based upon how much money a department has, an arrangement that is often counter to the mission of the institution.
With separate charges for a cornucopia of individual IT services – networking, backup, storage, etc. – users are tempted to avoid or minimize their costs, usually to the disadvantage of everyone. As users opt out of a service it becomes less economical to offer and more expensive for those who remain. If users avoid something critical in order to control costs, such as online backup, it hurts everyone.
If rental car companies used pricing similar to that of most IT departments they’d go back to charging for mileage – and people would go back to figuring out how to keep their mileage low instead of enjoying their vacations. There would be a charge for seat-width since wider people put more wear and tear on a car. You’d have a storage access quota. Any more than two accesses to the trunk per day (your quota) would cost you extra. Since driving in reverse puts extra strain on the transmission, there would be a daily back-up charge. How would you feel if rental car companies did this to you? Why do it to your users?
History
How much orientation do your new IT people get? A tour of the campus,
a three-minute introduction to each of the IT folks, and an hour chat with
HR folks? How do they learn the history, mission, and culture of the place
that expects them to provide exemplary services? Disney is far from the
only place that understands the need for employees that live the company
culture. At Bell Telephone Labs many years ago, all new members of the
technical staff attended weeks of classes part time in which they learned
the history of the Labs and its then-parent, AT&T, as well the history
of telephone switching. It was like being at the Labs from the invention
of the telephone to the present. And to keep current, there were regular
weekly updates from senior AT&T and Bell Labs management. Everyone
knew where the company had been, where it was going, and their vital role
in getting it there – and they understood the culture of the Labs. For
the users and colleagues that worked with them, each technical staff
member was Bell Labs. They provided the same high level of service and
dedication to mission that the long-timers did. Even if they never used
radio astronomy or transistors, they knew it was one of them that had invented it and they knew at a basic level how those
things worked.
Your IT people work for your college or university, not just the IT department. They will serve your users more effectively when “We work for Euphoric State” becomes “We are Euphoric State.”
Mission statements
All of Disney World’s employees – even their IT department –
know the business they are in. Their 15-word mission statement is “We
create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment to people of all
ages, everywhere.” Every employee from a maid to the president knows it.
When a decision needs to be made it is tested against how well it creates happiness for Disney’s guests. This is equally true in
long-term planning and in everyday encounters with guests. All employees
are driven to create happiness
for their guests, and they do. Their guests probably have no idea what the
mission statement is, nor do they care if there even is one. But they feel
it and see its results in hundreds of ways.
If you asked a janitor, engineer, or administrator at NASA in the 1960s what their job was, they would have answered with no hesitation, “To put an American on the Moon.” People didn’t say, “We provide electricity for manned space vehicles” which is what they actually did. Their mission was sending an American to the Moon. Everyone clearly understood the mission and all were totally committed to its success. Of course NASA did successfully land Americans on the Moon. What would someone at NASA say today if they were asked about their mission? “We do some kind of space stuff, I guess” is a likely answer. Compare the support of most Americans for NASA today to what it was during the Moon launches to see what a difference having a mission makes.
Your IT department probably has a mission statement too. Here’s a composite of several found on the web: “The Department of Information Technology of Catatonic State College through the efficient use of current and future technologies, designs, programs, and administers websites, web-enabled applications, administrative, academic and student systems in support of the campus community.” Does this sound like yours? What does it mean? How can IT folks focus like laser beams on fulfilling their mission when they are not sure what it is? Many IT mission statements run on for over 200 words.
At Euphoric State College, the school’s mission statement is “We provide quality education that is compelling and entertaining to ordinary people.” The mission statement of Euphoric State College’s IT department is the same as the mission statement of the college itself. How can an IT department have a mission different from the school it is part of? Disney guests see the entire company focused on creating happiness for them. University IT users often see the IT department focused on IT stuff while other parts of the school are off worrying about other things. It’s no wonder that Disney guests feel pampered while IT users feel confused. IT departments, like all departments, need institutional focus to provide exemplary service to their customers.
Focus
On November 6, 2003, Shishedo America was in the first day of its
three-day East Windsor, New Jersey warehouse sale. Shunji Funaki, whose
normal job is cosmetics research and development, spent those three days
as a lipstick model for the sale, with numbers drawn on his forearms in
every possible lipstick shade to help the mobs of people order lipstick
more quickly. Nearly everyone in the plant gave up their normal jobs to
pitch in during the sale to provide great customer service.
At Disney World, if there is a sudden crush of guests that need some service – from helping check-in a crowd at a hotel to helping with a weather emergency – everyone is ready to drop anything less important and provide service to guests. If a vice president can defer the study of a spreadsheet, he or she will happily be pressed into service directly helping guests. No one says, “That’s not my job” or “We don’t do that.” Instead they ask how they can best create happiness for their guests and then do it.
Many years ago at Bell Labs, any member of the technical staff could work on nearly any project outside of their assigned area if they could find a manager willing to have them. They had to excel at the job they were actually assigned to and then take on the other assignment as extra work. Would anyone choose to do a ton of extra work for no extra pay or perks? Many people gladly did. Some managers had large flocks of volunteers while some had none. Those managers with the extra staff were always sharply focused and passionate about their projects. There was no doubt where they were going and droves of the brightest people volunteered to help them get there.
If your staff knows your mission and becomes passionate about it they can do incredible, even magical, things. Of course your staff is expert in Windows, UNIX, Excel, HTML, XML, and whatever. Every IT department knows the nuts and bolts of computing. Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey is a fine amusement park and has bigger, scarier roller coasters than Disney World, but people don’t travel thousands of miles to spend days there. Disney World doesn’t offer better rides, they offer a staff committed to creating happiness for its guests. They fuss about tiny details. Even maids try to outdo each other. Sure they make hotel rooms spotless, but they get no kudos for doing what’s expected. On their own, maids started tucking guests’ souvenir stuffed animals into bed, or arranged them watching the TV. Kids and adults were delighted at these 60 seconds of extra effort in creating the magic that makes Disney so special.
Your IT department probably offers fine service. Maybe that’s good enough. But happier users will not scream as loudly when something fails. They might even be supportive and are more likely to support IT when it asks for more resources or makes disruptive changes to systems. A focused staff, passionate about what it is doing will enjoy their work more even though they are working harder. And of course they’ll be more productive, improving the quality of your entire institution. If Disney’s maids can do it, surely your IT staff can. Maybe some of your users will still put aside their ERP systems to spend a week in Disney World, but don’t be surprised to get mouse-shaped cards from users telling you how much they miss those wonderful IT people.
Howard Strauss is the manager of technology strategy and outreach at
Princeton University.
The Edutech Report is a monthly publication of Magna Publications
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