I mentioned a few days ago that I would talk about how organisations might better manage their clients’ experience. So here we go...

Unless you want to take the chance that your client will only ever find out how well you can deliver a service (over and above your core product or service proposition) by how you deal with cock-ups, there are three key stages of the client experience that you must manage.

First of all is the promise. If your client thinks that they are going to get something different from what they actually receive, then, no matter how good what you provide is, there is a strong possibility that they will be disappointed. A good example of this is how a decade or so ago EasyJet allowed cameras to follow what were often moments of pain and anguish for their customers in the TV series Airline.

I was never really clear what Stelios (the founder of EasyJet) was up to in agreeing to take part in the show - it always appeared to show the firm in a fairly poor light with customers being turned away at the gate when late, and given short shrift when requesting refunds or transfers to other flights.

However, seen in the light of helping to manage the expectations of customers down, it makes perfect sense. Before the rise of budget airlines, air transport was assumed a luxury purchase. In the EasyJet budget world, there was no room for luxury on a 99p flight to Alicante, and the programme Airline frequently illustrated the point.

The second step to manage the client experience is in the way in which the perception of service is managed as that service is being delivered. Something that people in the engineering world often get wrong (and this is one area where I would say Google still have a lot to learn) is that just providing a high quality product is rarely enough. Whether it's the greeting you receive at a hotel reception desk, the liveried uniform worn by the sales assistant, or the call to say that the problem has been fixed, there is a stack of the superficial that makes a tangible difference to how clients feel about the service they receive.

In some instances, the surrounding warm and fuzzy feeling is more important than the technical service. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks of insurance companies researching the premiums that should be payable by doctors finding that the bedside manner (or lack of) had more correlation with likelihood of a practitioner being sued than any objective measure of the quality of medical advice received.

The final part of managing the client experience is making sure that you evidence back to the client the quality of what has been delivered, because if you don't, you leave it to them to find out only when it fails. In recent years most supermarkets have adopted this approach in the way in which they structure their receipts.

In days before, discounts and BOGOFs would be liberally scattered around the printed receipt in the order in which the checkout assistant scanned the items. These days the 'money shot' of discounts is saved up until the end of the transaction, and then usually highlighted on the bill with words like 'today you have saved'.

If all three of these element are in place, managing the clients experience of the service you provide becomes a far easier challenge. Each missing brick makes the job harder, and if you only rely on the quality of your product... Well, if things fail, you'll probably lose your clients if you're in an open market.

Next article, I’ll talk a bit more about what sorts of things we’ve been doing to put some of these ideas into practice.

Google have been impressed by what we've achieved in the past few months in our efforts to go Google - so much so that they've made a video about it. You can find it here.

A bit of a project for the summer months. I've often noticed that we miss fascinating bits of architecture, strange historical artifacts, and other wonderful things in our day to day life because we rarely look up above the horizontal.

So in the next couple of months I am going to try to take a few moments out every day to spot things that I haven't noticed before. Photos will be posted to Twitter, hash-tagged #summerlookup. Feel free to join me!

If you ask people in general about what companies they see as offering great client service, you will hear an interesting set of responses. Some modern firms get mentioned (like, say, Amazon) where the quality of service is easily measurable (for example, do they deliver when they say they will?) and transparent to the consumer (order tracking and so on). The other category of candidate firms tend to be those that handle problems well. M&S used to feature highly, as did John Lewis - both retailers with a history of straightforward and lenient returns policies.

Ask people about bad client service, and things tend to be much more straightforward. Companies that handle problems badly.

This isn't just conjecture - these were questions that I asked of hundreds of people in my years as a consultant. The upshot of all of this is that if you provide a product or service, you must ensure that you manage the experience around it well, otherwise you'll be dependent on handling mistakes for your clients to find out how good you are. And that might just be too late...

I'll talk a bit about how that client experience might be structured at a later date - I mainly want to get what has been the worst client experience I have had in many, many years off my chest.

Lenovo (and previously IBM) have been our supplier of choice for Windows laptop machines for quite some time. In April we ordered a batch of 25 devices through our reseller. I had been relatively happy with the quality of the devices being supplied until recently, and our Lenovo account manager had been one of the best people we've been dealing with in recent years. Warning signs were there in the Spring, however, when a series of supply issues started to emerge.

The batch of devices we had ordered arrived, and as we asset tagged them, my team noticed that on a number of them (13, to be precise) USB ports were mounted in such a way that inserting a USB plug took quite substantial force. I got in touch with our reseller, and requested to return the faulty devices. Lenovo got back and said we would have to return them for repair.

I don't know about you, but if you've spent £850 on a laptop, sending it for repair before you have even used it seems a bit of a rum deal.A baker's dozen, even more so. I refused, and requested replacements.

Other than reasonably regular emails from my account manager saying "things were being escalated", nothing happened until last week, seven or so weeks after the initial order was received. The response was a detailed technical description about how, even if it did take some substantial force to insert or remove a device, it was within the specified force (in Newtons) to comply with USB specifications, and therefore there wasn't a problem.

Seven weeks of silence, and then a science lecture. I responded that it seemed Lenovo were leaving me little choice but to find an alternative supplier.

That received no response, and, to make matters worse, it turned out that the manager concerned then went on holiday. Probably he needed a rest after measuring too many Newtons.

Chasing again this week, and it wasn't until yesterday morning that I was called by a colleague of the Newton-measurer, and that call was to tell me that there was nothing that he could do for me. I haven't had many more pointless phone conversations in my life. Later yesterday afternoon I was contacted by the manager's manager. Who also told me that there was nothing that they could do for me with regard to the devices that had a problem (but weren't faulty).

As I have pointed out, at length, we've been paying premium prices for Lenovo equipment over the years on the basis of the promise of quality manufacturing and service associated with a major manufacturer (let's be honest, one called IBM). If all of the units had been identical, then it might have been a reasonable case to suggest that they were built to specification, but there was substantial variation. Holding down a laptop with two hands to plug and unplug devices (which on well-travelled laptops happens frequently) is a broken motherboard waiting to happen.

But even worse than the product quality, has been the way in which they have dealt with it. Seven weeks of complete silence, followed, essentially, by a lecture that I am wrong, and that they are to do nothing to try to resolve the situation other than tell me that I am wrong. One would expect this from Steve Jobs, but I can't buy MacOS devices from anyone else so I have to put up with it. Lenovo are in a very crowded marketplace.

The crowning glory of this whole episode was this morning. After promising that someone would get back to me with a proposal for delivering some sort of client satisfaction, Newton-Monitor-in-Chief left that to the poor (and now with one less client) account manager. And the "satisfaction"? That Lenovo weren't to do anything. At all.

If anyone from Lenovo gets to read this, you are more than welcome to leave comments.

Project work this week included:

- preparing for network provider client reference visits
- continuing to present the Google Phase 2 project to Group Board members
- seeing our cloud-hosted BES go live (eventually)
- observing the Shangai office fit-out from afar

Additionally:

- presented at the Google CIO event
- responded to more clients' feedback from the 2010 IT Survey
- saw myself on video (more on that soon)
- saw one of our core hardware providers (Lenovo) fail to deliver so as to lose us as a customer (ditto)

Next week in one word: references

One amusing moment for many at yesterday's event was the assertion that the HR and IT roles in organisations are increasingly becoming one.

This seems obvious to me, but only if one understands the transformational aspects of those disciplines, and not confuse them with the transactional. And one also acknowledges that the HR world has as strong an image problem as the IT world does.

Five years ago I took part in a team coaching exercise with the board of a government agency. We had the five members of the board together in a hotel for a couple of days, and started the event with a warm up exercise. Each member of the team was asked to write down a type of car, and that car should be, in their eyes, representative of how they saw themselves in their role.

These cars were then drawn anonymously from a hat, and one by one the team were asked to guess who had chosen which. Out of a hat came a VW Beetle. The four male, middle-aged, middle class men all thought that this was the choice of the female, slightly younger HR Director. It wasn't until the Ferrari came out of the hat that we actually discovered the car that the personnel head had actually chosen.

Back to yesterday's assertion - if it's the routine, somewhat plodding transactional side of HR services (disciplinary procedures, administering performance management processes, recruitment processes, policy creation and enforcement etc) merged with the technology aspect of IT (running boxes, setting up user accounts, etc) then a process hydra of epic proportions would be born (and go on to scare small children no doubt).

However, bringing the organisational development, leadership, team building and other transformational aspects together would be an entirely different beast. I've been bandying around the concept of the "Chief Collaboration Officer" recently - the logical extension from CTO through CIO... and that, potentially, is what was being envisaged at the Altitude event yesterday.

A good day at Millbank. The event was videoed, so that might be available online soon, but in the meantime,
here's the slidedeck.

I guess that I just don't understand economics as well as the former Selfridges shelf-stacker and data entry guru George Osborne.

In my simple world, if something goes catastrophically wrong (say, like the world banking system), then I would be looking to try to make some changes to that system to stop it doing it again in the future. How wrong I must
be... Obviously what is needed is to make sweeping cuts to the public services, whilst raising indirect taxation, to make sure that those who (some may argue) got us in to the mess in the first place (the 'collateralised debt is a triple-A investment' ratings agencies) take kindly on the economy.

Or, if you'd like an alternative interpretation of what's going on, take a look at Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'.

Rant over.

Meanwhile, it has got me thinking about the dangers of macro-economic forecasting. There is a darker side to the whole cloud revolution that I haven't really spoken about on these pages, but has important consequences for those who think that it is only private-sector enterprise that can save the economy.

In the UK, there are an awfully large number of people who work in technical IT jobs. If they aren't supplier side (and even for many of them that are), there are some substantial career issues on the horizon. Namely, that Cloud will probably make many of those roles redundant.

Now there are extremely valuable jobs that will need to be done in the new world of helping organisations adapt to the new technologies. However, the skills profile of most IT people really don't match to what will be required in the years ahead.

Simply put, the five-year fixed-term that the government is now so slavishly working to seems to take little account of the fact the five years is a very long time in the modern world, and that job markets and industries can be subjected to colossal change in such a period. Five years ago, Apple didn't do mobile phones...

Focus on the public sector alone seems to be making huge assumptions about the underlying industries that make up the private sector. Putting aside the knock-on effect that average 25% cuts are going to have on private sector suppliers, in five years time we could have witnessed dramatic contraction in many industries (not least IT) because of evolution in markets.

But hey. As long as Standard and Poor are happy...

I'm going to be speaking at the Google CIO Summit being held in Millbank Tower tomorrow (see here for info from "my PR people" (how much of a novelty is that?)).

The talk is only short, but then followed a bit later by a Q&A where I will be joining people from The Telegraph and from one of our key clients (co-incidentally) Jaguar Land Rover. We've recently launched our annual IT survey, so one of the key things that I'll be able to talk about is initial responses about the successes of the Google project thus far in numbers.

I will post the presentation up here after the event.

I was interviewed last week by a journalist from Computer Weekly for an article that he is writing about Cloud Computing, and security.

One trend that I have noticed in recent months is that some of our bigger clients are blocking access to file sharing services like YouSendIt and DropBox. The driver behind this I assume is to try to prevent staff from using these services to circumvent information security policies. This, for me, is typical "wash ups and midgets" behaviour (especially when, as a result, clients become totally reliant on extranet services that are provided by my team that have only limited bandwidth because of the way in which they are currently hosted.

Information, to coin a cliché, is like water. If you ignore its passage, it will find a way out somehow. Best to provide adequate pipes and channels to prevent leaks springing up inconveniently. The problem with blacklisting services like YouSendIt is simple - there are more services like it springing up every day, and companies who try to block these channels will be chasing their tails.

What companies do need to do is provide adequate training, policy and guidance to all of their staff about how they can share information in safe and secure ways.

Project work this week included:

- launching the 2010 Imagination IT survey (and surprising some by actually responding to their feedback)
- signing off the hosted BES service
- short-listing network service providers

Additionally:

- interviewed by Computer Weekly about cloud security
- met with my old boss from the BBC who is over from Beijing for the week (nice to see you, Tim!)
- did the first presentation to London staff about what is happening in the next 12 months in Imagination IT
- finalised a presentation for the Google CIO event in London next week

Next week in one word: altitude.

I have been clearing through some old books recently, and came across The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester which tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

I read the book a number of years ago, but one thing that stuck with me was the way in which the OED built improvement into their approach.

The for the first edition of the OED, the editors began, logically, at the letter 'A', and then worked sequentially through the alphabet. For the second edition, they started at the letter 'M'. The reason behind that choice was that they figured that by mid-alphabet the original editors had probably got their act together.

For round two, starting revising (many decades later - edition one took 71 years to create) from a point where the quality would probably be fairly good, thus allowing the second edition team to get up to speed with their processes by the time that they got to the content that probably needed most work.

It still strikes me as how clever, in that it is so obvious, this approach was.

Last week I wrote about my concerns about the way in which Apple is decreasingly a computer company. This week whilst away on holiday, I read this article in Wired UK about how Steve Jobs has Adobe in his sights.

So, let's just recap. The computer platform that most of the creative industry seems wedded to (MacOS) is produced by a company that seems to be totally consumer (rather than business) focused, and is also in a very public feud with the manufacturer of the software on which most of it's business consumers rely? And some people say that I'm mad to consider even raising the question of moving away from Apple...

Additionally:

- Padstow is nice...
- ...but a little over-dominated by Mr Stein
- ...but he does do very good fish and chips

Next week in one word: preparing

Projects work this week included:

- planning the Google Phase 2 board communications
- delivering a highly successful presentation to the European MD
- working with Ovum and Google on a couple of case studies
- sitting on the sidelines (where I should be) as my team ran the first supplier presentations in a major procurement exercise

Additionally:

- shared Asia experiences with the team...
- ...travel tips with the Group FD
- and marvelled on how, when they work, there's nothing quite as persuasive as a live demo.

Next week in one word: Holiday

This week saw a notable shift in the balance of power in the technology world. Apple (according to the somewhat dubious valuations accorded by the global stock markets) is now worth more as a company than Microsoft.

The two companies, who began at a similar time in the 1970s, have seen incredibly opposite trajectories since they first emerged from the hobbyist microcomputer market. In the mid-1990s, in the days before the Internet (www) explosion, it could be argued that it was only the direct investment by Microsoft in its ailing (and Steve Jobs-free) competitor that kept Apple in business.

Today the tables have turned. Microsoft appears to be a fading star (one of those ones that expands massively before turning into a black hole). Unless something dramatically turns around for them, it seems the Web 2.0 world will leave them staring at lost license revenue.

Apple, on the other hand, are in the ascendant. In a week when their next great hope, the iPad, launched outside the US, their reinvention as the arch consumer media products marketing engine seems complete.

Which leaves me wondering... How serious are they about manufacturing computers these days? Apple seem to be a marketing company, specialising in media content and distribution channels, with a legacy personal computer company tacked on the side.

As with many organisations in the Creative sector, the most important business computers in Imagination are high-spec, high-cost Mac workstations. If you put the history aside for a moment, this increasingly feels like a retail company buying its EPOS systems from News International or Disney.

Actually, given the Pixar connection, maybe I am buying our core business systems from Disney. Cue 'Mickey Mouse Organisation' jokes...