“Fax, Don’t Answer”

It was 12:30 in the afternoon, lunch rush-hour in the business district of Herzilya, dubbed by many “Israel’s Silicon Valley”. I walked into this Sushi restaurant about 15 minutes earlier and placed a take-away order. Since the place was crowded with all kinds of IT employees decadently having Sushi for lunch, I sat on a bar stool just beside the service area, where everything was happening — the waiters and waitresses were bustling in and out of the kitchen, the bar tenders were pouring drinks, and the shift manager was overlooking everyone and was generally looking worried. As if the eat-in crowd wasn’t enough, there were many orders coming in by phone for people to pick up. I noticed there were two phones on the wall — they were completely identical, the only difference was that one of them had a sticker on it. The sticker said: “Fax, Don’t Answer”. I even took a picture of it:

Can you see the right-hand phone has a small white sticker on it? I noticed this because what happened was that every time a phone rang (any of the phones, they sound completely alike) people would reach for one of them, then they’d wait for the next ring to figure out which phone it came from, and then they’d think if they should or should not answer, because there really is no point in picking up the fax phone. I observed this for another 30 minutes or so until my order was ready. For some reason faxes were coming in (or people were accidentally dialing the fax number) pretty often, which kept throwing people out of “the zone”, slowing down everything.

If the fax number is only used for faxes, why is that phone even ringing, why not just mute it? And why is it hung on the wall right next to the regular phone? This is a good real-world example of what it means to make data accessible and coherent. Even the veteran employees there err sometimes and pickup the fax phone, so what happens to the new ones? They must get totally confused by this.

Think of the phones as organizational master data. Should everyone be exposed to the fax phone? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let the few people who actually get faxes have access to it? Why confuse people by placing two identical phones when one should never be used? I often say that master data management is more than consolidation and data quality improvement — it’s also about making data more accessible and coherent. SAP MDM provides many tools to make data clearer to your users. Don’t replicate the existing complex data structure, try to improve it, clean it, make it simpler to use and to understand.

• Translate field and table names if your users speak different languages.
• Don’t use codes — use Lookup tables or remote-keys to let the user select values from a list of real words instead of codes, and save the codes in the background.
• Use MDM’s rich set of field types — why have 2 fields called “Length” and “Length UOM” instead of a single Measurement field called “Length”?
• Use the Portal iViews to make the data stored in MDM accessible (even as read-only) for many users via a web-based interface.

The list goes on. The bottom line is — don’t just consolidate, improve. Make the data more accessible, empower users, make it easier for new-comers to dive right in. MDM has all the tools to do it, use them.