I've often said that government has no corner on bureaucracy. Almost any large organization, for-profit, non-profit, government, has a large bureaucracy. They have to in order to look into many, many details that are needed to run the organization efficiently. You read that right, an organization needs a bureaucracy to be efficient.
Who is going to do the details of hiring and firing? Who is going to process the payroll for thousands of employees. Who is going to pay and collect the bills. Certainly not the executives. Certainly not the employees involved in developing new products. Certainly not the employees providing goods or services to customers.
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to take care of details that free other employees to do the primary work of the organization.
One corporate bureaucracy is customer support. These are the folks that process customer questions and complaints and attempt to find solutions. When run well, customer support provides satisfaction to the customers and feedback to the rest of the organization. When customer support is not given organization support, it devolves into an unresponsive bureaucracy. The result is less customer satisfaction, which in turn can lead to the demise of the organization.
A case study is the corporation many love to hate but many depend on for the functioning of their own organizations - Microsoft.
I mentioned my calendar problems in "Quote of the day - Ease of use" and "Misdirected ire".
Since then, I've been subscribing to a thread "Meetings disappearing" on Microsoft's Apple Support Discussions. Hoo Boy! Talk about non-responsiveness! This thread has been going on since February and there appears to be no resolution.
Well, maybe there was some resolution. Many report that if they set up a regular weekly appointment for a year and then change one, all subsequent appointments disappeared! How often are regular meetings changed in your organization? Sometimes changed meetings become the norm. What was the solution that one writer said Microsoft proposed? Set up 52 individual appointments for the year!! Wow! That certainly is a shining example of productivity improvement. Guess what? When the user changed one of the 52 individual appointments, the subsequent appointments disappeared.
What a way to run a railroad or any business! I've had better responsiveness from city, state, and federal bureaucracies.
