I recently saw a documentary on British TV about the low cost airline RyanAir. The CEO claimed excellent customer service because they are able to deliver the cheapest flights in Europe (cost), best punctuality (time), and the most modern fleet of aircraft (quality). However, their customers do not necessarily agree with the assertion that this represents excellent customer service. A quick web search will return a good deal of evidence that customers experiences are somewhat out of alignment with the CEO’s view.
The programme served to highlight the difference between the perspective of business success and user acceptance. Its difficult to argue against the fact that RyanAir are a successful business, but at what cost?
So when it comes to informatics projects, how do we measure success? There are three phases in an implementation that may have different measures. In the short term, completing the implementation on time, on budget and in full (all deliverables) represents the conclusion of a successful project. In the mid term, the return on investment becomes a success criterion; how soon can we claim that the upfront costs have been recovered through some form of increased productivity. But in the long term, the metrics become more fuzzy. Most informatics projects will have a knowledge management component that targets sharing, collaboration and IP protection that lead to some discernible improvement in the way the business operates. These three phases roughly align to the three basic criteria of cost, time and quality, the emphasis in the first phase being on time and project costs, in the second phase on ROI (costs) and in the third phase on quality. So in the Ryanair example, the difference of opinion centres around ‘quality’, a discussion that seems sadly out of date since ‘fit for purpose’ is a modern acceptable catch-all definition for quality, and that having the latest and greatest doesn’t automatically correspond to a quality solution.
This argument tends to reinforce the fact that user acceptance is the most critical long term success factor for any informatics project, and as a consequence, identifies where a lot of effort needs to be made in project planning. This means keeping careful control of user requirements, keeping users involved throughout implementation, and recognising and supporting the full spectrum of users.
This was the basis of a presentation I gave at the 5th Forum on Laboratory Informatics, San Francisco, Oct 26-28th. The presentation is available here.
