Organisational inefficiencies not only damage customer relationships, but they also carry operational costs that most organisations can ill-afford.

Over the last 12 months we've noticed an increasing level of interest and concern with eliminating self-inflicted operational cost. These costs arise when the different parts of an organisation that play a role in an overall customer process behave in ways that create work (and re-work) for each other.

When the economy was making steady progress, these kinds of operational failure often didn't register. But in a period of financial turmoil and falling performance, more and more organisations are becoming aware of the financial impact of cross-functional processes that are less than sparkling.

Although the issue is 'on the radar' in a way that we have not seen for some time, many of the people we talk to are struggling to make the necessary connections at a process level that will help them identify appropriate courses of remedial action.

On the face of it this is a bit odd, since these are also organisations that have spent heavily on Business Intelligence and data warehouse solutions.

The blunt conclusion is that whilst many of these systems are undeniably very sophisticated and 'clever' - they are not always very intelligent. What we have found is that many examples of BI and MIS go very deep at the level of individual process components such as sales; marketing; and customer services, but are not always very helpful in revealing how an end-to-end customer delivery process is working.

For example: a home services organisation was concerned that although its contact centre was performing well, according to its established metrics, there was a steady increase in the number of engineers arriving at customer premises without the correct parts to complete the job due to incomplete or inaccurate information gathered when the customer first called. Investigation showed that customer service agents were primarily measured on call duration rather than quality of the information gathered from the customer. While they were meeting their 'performance targets' they were also increasing organisational cost since failed engineer visits were more costly in the long run than longer calls to collect the right information in the first place.

You might say 'all's well that ends well' in that the problem was identified and remedied. But the fact is it wouldn't have emerged as a problem at all if the performance information had been properly tailored to the way the business worked to start with.

The fact is, times are hard and are likely to stay hard for the next 18 - 24 months. Managing through this means getting the right MI in place quickly and without yet more infrastructure investment. It's possible, but we have to think less about software features and functions and more about the nature of performance and business process on a case by case basis.