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Apple did something ingenious when it came up with the idea of a Genius Bar in 2001 with the opening of its first Apple retail store. At a time when many other vendors left consumers to sit and stew while technical support staff in far-off places attempted to solve their problems over the phone, or via a painstakingly slow chat function, Apple got personal. Specifically, it let its buyers belly on up and have a real-live, face-to-face session with an Apple-trained tech right at their local Apple retail store.
This idea has apparently caught on with some CIOs who want to make their own IT staff more accessible and approachable to internal users, too. The Seattle headquarters of Starbucks, for example, features a Tech Café IT help desk modeled on the Apple store: InformationWeek reported that under direction of CIO Stephen Gillett, employees can come in, browse computing equipment they want to use, or connect with an IT staffer at the coffee king’s own version of a Genius Bar.
That’s a good first start, but I’m guessing that the Genius Bar concept can be taken even further. In fact, I think there’s an opportunity for each party — IT and business users — to have a chance at playing Genius. IT has valuable information to impart about technical support and a lot more. But the consumerization of IT has made business users not only more vocal about what they want, but also more savvy about the goals. In other words, the “bar” could be an exchange of ideas for both sides.
IT and Espresso
Having a physical Genius Bar already in place is not a prerequisite for fostering a deeper discussion between IT and the users it serves, however. It’s great if you have one, as far as ambience and meeting logistics go, but there’s nothing to stop IT leaders from booking a conference room and renting an espresso machine for regular bimonthly or even more frequent meetings with various invited segments of the business-user community.
The idea is to keep it informal, not to have business unit leaders or department members presenting ideas to the IT staff. Rather, it is about giving IT an opportunity to pick their brains about how they — and maybe their customers — would like to use new tools and technologies. Ideally, the goal is to make those dreams come true.
And the timing couldn’t better. Here are a few recent trends that might help you kick off a Genius session or two at your enterprise:
- The new Apple iPad is here. Research company GigaOM recently posted a blog by Stacey Higginbotham pointing to research showing that 64 percent of mobile workers now carry a tablet. The blog focused on network and security issues, but your Genius session with your tablet users — which should include as many frequent traveler execs and field workers as possible — might focus on getting as much value out of these devices as they can, every day. Chances are, they’re already familiar with applications out there that help them do their jobs better. IT can learn about those apps in the context of nuts-and-bolts concerns such as security and volume-licensing opportunities. But perhaps even more valuable is the chance for IT to see whether there are ways to boost user experiences and build some good will.
- The new Apple iPad is here. Yes, I know I said that already, but there’s so much going on in the tablet world that surely you don’t expect to cover it all in one Genius session! So also plan to set up some Genius time with your marketing crew. Last October, The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, in collaboration with The Economist Group, provided impressive figures about tablet adoption: It reported that 11 percent of U.S. adults own a tablet and 77 percent use it every day. For its part, ChangeWave Research, a service of 451 Research, in a survey Your marketing folks should be exploring ways to exploit tablet use for enterprise customer and consumer advantage.
Another recent survey from Equation Research, reports that 41 percent of the tablet users have experienced slow load times and crashes, poor page formatting, and other issues that may mean it’s time to think about optimizing websites for the new format.
Chatting up Social Media
- Social media — that one’s here too. Companies are still struggling to make sense of it. If your company is like many others, marketing probably has led many of the efforts to figure out how to use social media to promote the brand and respond to customers, but it’s been a difficult proposition and one that’s getting ever more so. You want to bring the marketing folks to the Genius Bar (again) so you can better understand what they’re doing and what obstacles they’re struggling to surmount — and it’s guaranteed much of it will have to do with a very big, very unstructured, data analytics problem. They can’t go it alone, and they need your IT department to be aware of the importance of coming to grips with the challenge — even if your team is still struggling with that itself.
Enterprise 2.0 collaboration has been long promised, but is as yet largely unrealized. I urge you to read the whole of a blog I’ll excerpt here. It’s at Beyond the Cube and was written by Laurie Buczek, who formerly managed the internal social collaboration efforts for a large global enterprise, and who watched those efforts fail to achieve what she had hoped for. One of the points she makes is that: “We managed to do the normal IT deployment model — the very model I fiercely advocated for us not to do. We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools — without integration. To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.”
That’s a fate Laurie thinks can be avoided. I do, too, especially if you set up a Genius Bar gathering for social business strategy managers as well as those who have carved a name for themselves in social media. As Laurie notes, these folks can explain how internal social media communities need to feel natural and part of the workflow.
I’m sure there are plenty of other topics you’d like to engage in more deeply with the business over a cup of cappuccino or tea, so I’ll leave you to take it from here. Let us know where you think your own Genius Bar might go — and enjoy!
©2012 Smart Enterprise