According to American, "Customers with PriorityAccess privileges will be invited to board first or board at any time through their exclusive PriorityAAccess lane, which allows them to bypass lines after general boarding has begun." The new configuration seems to be pretty uniform; I’ve seen it at every airport I’ve flown out of over the past month, which is more than a couple.
The new configuration also seems to be uniformly ignored. My fellow travelers and I have continued to line up and board just as we always do, except now we use two narrow lanes instead of one broad one. I haven’t yet seen us fliers make any effort to sort ourselves into the ‘right’ lane, and I certainly haven’t seen anyone voluntarily take themselves out of the lane reserved for the elites and rejoin the general boarding hoi polloi.
More importantly, I also haven’t seen American’s gate agents make any effort to sort us properly. I’ve heard them make announcements about the two lanes, but that’s as far as it’s gone. I haven’t seen anyone walk the lanes to explain what’s going on and check boarding passes, and I definitely haven’t seen them turn anyone away once they reach the head of the line and hand over their boarding pass. I can only imagine what would happen if a gate agent said to someone about to board ‘Sorry, sir, you’ve been in the wrong lane. You’ll have to join the general boarding line. At the back."
It struck me at some point over the past month that I was witnessing an excellent example of why so many business improvement efforts fail: it’s not that they’re not good ideas, it’s that their not easy enough to enforce. American’s PriorityAAccess boarding procedure is a straightforward case of what used to be called ‘business process reengineering,’ and it’s also a microcosm of why reengineering so often failed. It’s one thing for a small group of smart people to study an existing process and figure out a way to execute it better. It’s quite another to then deploy that new-and-improved process broadly – across many business units, geographies, and/or interdependent groups.
As the example of AA’s new boarding process indicates, reengineering often runs aground not because customers or other external constituencies are unwilling to go along, but because employees are. Airline gate agents have plenty to do as a flight boards; is it realistic to expect them to also wrangle uneducated (and, in many cases, unwilling) fliers into the right lines all throughout the boarding process? PriorityAAccess boarding requires either that all of us travelers self-police, which seems extremely unlikely, or that American’s gate agents work diligently to enforce the new process. So far, playing enforcer here seems to be pretty low on their list of proirities. This doesn’t mean that they’re lazy or obstinate, just that they’re busy and stretched thin as it is, and I don’t see where the slack required to let them play enforcer is supposed to come from.
Which brings us (you knew this was coming, right?) to information technology. One of modern IT’s most underappreciated roles is as an enforcer of process discipline. Today’s enterprise systems make sure that complex, multi-step processes – ones that involve employees, customers, suppliers, and other groups — are executed the same way time after time, location after location, with few or no exceptions. I just attained Platinum status on AA (a dubious achievement), which means that I can now request upgrades 72 hours in advance. I can’t sweet-talk the AA website to try to get my request in 75 hours in advance, and I’m pretty sure that if I call up the airline and try to sweet-talk the customer service rep I’ll get politely told that there’s just no way. The airline’s systems are configured to start accepting such requests no sooner than 72 hours in advance, and getting around this configuration is difficult, if not impossible, for me.
Today, the parts of a business process that are executed with the assistance of IT are the easiest ones to control, monitor, and enforce. They’re also the easiest ones to reengineer with confidence, a point Erik Brynjolfsson and I highlighted in our recent Harvard Business Review article about IT’s competitive impact (posts on this topic are here and here).
Processes that are technology-free, meanwhile, can be maddeningly difficult and slow to improve. IT-free reengineering is not impossible – I’ve seen Southwest, for example, successfully make major changes to its boarding process, and I’ve also seen other airlines start to refuse people boarding before their group number has been called — but it’s definitely hard, often much harder than clever process architects foresee.
An old Chinese saying about the power of regional bureaucrats holds that "The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away." If remote locations, for whatever reason, don’t want to follow new orders from a central authority, there have historically been few good tools available to enforce compliance. In the era of the Internet and enterprise IT, the situation is very different. Some types of new order can be embedded in information technology so that they’re faithfully followed. Orders from headquarters that can’t be backed up with technology, meanwhile, diffuse slowly and with low fidelity, as the example of PriorityAAcesss boarding so far shows.
As technology touches more and more aspects of our working lives and business processes, the percentage of IT-free processes like PriorityAAccess should continue to decrease. As someone who wants things to run smoothly, I welcome this development. Do you? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
p.s. Happy Election Day!
p.p.s. I asked my MBA students last spring how many of them had read Hammer and Champy’s incredibly popular 1992 book Reengineering The Corporation. None of them had even heard of it. I felt old.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Students of competitive strategy will smile with the mention of American Airlines. In 1981, a tightly regulated airline industry effectively prevented any carrier from differentiating themselves by fares or routes or pretty much anything else. It was apples to apples all the way.
American Airlines employed a textbook flanking strategy, getting the jump on United, their toughest competitor, by introducing the Aadvantage program. 150,000 American customers, stored in a Sabre reservations system database, were given the opportunity to collect “miles” and use them for upgrades and free flights. It was information technology (plus some creative competitive marketing) that gave American the edge, even way back then.
American certainly got my attention. I chose American over United for a flight to California from New York just at that time–because of the promise of all those points. Now I’m well into the millions of points with American and hardly have flown United during the past 27 years. (I’m certainly old enough to have read Reengineering the Corporation…)
AA rarely gets processes right on the customer end.
Paying for checked bags is a great example. It slows down the check-in process because the attendant needs to collect the money. Let me pay the $15 when I buy the ticket!
It also has the effect of slowing boarding times as people shove more stuff in the overhead bins to avoid the charge.
The priority access that I have seen on AA and other airlines just slows down the process even more. Those priority fliers could be anywhere on the plane clogging up the more efficient boarding process.
IT can be used to set controls for a process. But it still needs to be a good process to begin with. Bad processes are often not enforced because the front-line worker knows that it is a bad idea. AA gate agents probably hate having that extra-line in front of them. It is just another burden to figure out who goes in which line. A burden that does not help them do their job or make passengers happier. (The priority passenger may like the extra lane, but the rest of the passenger do not.)
Just found your blog, nice topic, I think it’s great.
To answer your question about IT development, I wholeheartedly agree. Technology is a lot more reliable than people. As the role of IT grows, it would be great to have things run more smoothly. Useless programs like PriorityAAcess would become archaic if IT assumed the role it deserves. Hopefully that day will come sooner than later.
An interesting article (and one which I have linked to on a recent post at the Process Cafe).
I think we need to make sure that implementation of IT to support a business process happens because it makes sense for the process rather than because we think it’s the right thing to do. I can think of at least one example where automating a process has caused a glitch which has resulted in reduced customer satisfaction. This is to be avoided at all costs.
It is safe to say, however, that the majority of process innovations occur as a result of automation of the process to some extent.
Thanks for the article.
The problem with BPR methodologies and their IT implementations, are in their complete disregard of human behavior. In other words “clever” process people very rarely ask themselves why would employees follow proposed processes? When they do ask this question, the management common response is “because will tell them…..”. In other words we will police them. It so rarely works, yet businesses continue to waste money following this failed way of thinking and no technology will help here IMHO. On the other hand I have seen very successful results when the processes were re-designed respecting human aspect of the business process. The holistic methodology starts with two questions: 1. how we can do this better? and 2. how can we implement it so people would WANT to adopt the new process?
The first thing I thought of was that nearly all airlines are offering this “innovation” these days, and pretty much all of them operate in the way you describe.
Maybe some of the problem is there are just too many “plebes” to bother trying to sort out the elite class customers. Or there are only a few per flight, so the advantage isn’t really even noticed. Most airlines already invite their “premier” cutomsers to board first (or whenever they want) anyway.
With respect to these kinds of changes (whether IT or BPR), I like to think of a few things:
* What is the problem being resolved?
* How does the change resolve the problem (does it completely remove the issue, or just make it less annoying, for example)?
* What rules did the organization follow because the problem was there?
* What new rules will the organization follow now that the problem is gone? (And now that we have a new system in place).
I think Continental has succeeded with a similar process, but I also believe that their success proves your point. Their employees are on board in enforcing the process.
I wish they were not so diligent as I don’t qualify, but I admire the way in which they turned boarding into a marketing advantage to frequent fliers.
You highlight the HR management challenge of identifying, selecting and training personnel who are, and will continue to be, capable of change and adaptation to market demands. I have witnessed United personnel redirect coach passengers to the longer line. Hopefully they receive recognition for helping build the brand. Incidentally, although I am always relegated to the coach line, I do not find myself crowded by the narrower lane. We can only pass through the boarding process one at a time anyway.
The issue for Human Resources is that not everyone is cut out to police the rules, especially those based on class differences. The service personnel must also deal with alot of emotion but that’s what the job requires. I have heard one such worker address an agitated man by saying loudly enough to reassure us all that “yes, I understand how you feel but you have no right to frighten people.” Again, finding the right talent for those jobs which cannot be handled with IT is a challenge for all employers, including education and other service industries. Designing the recruitment and evaluation materials to fulfill the needs of the ever changing New/Knowledge Economy is an emerging focus in HR.
The Priority AAccess lane at AA gates is for the benefit of elite status travelers and works at all points in the airport where incentives are correctly aligned- i.e. check-in and security lanes. In fact, the new TSA Diamond Lane Self-Select Program, an IT free process change which relies on the individual to segment himself into the correct Expert, Casual or Family/Special Needs security lane, has improved processing time and customer satisfaction at over 30 airports nationwide. The problem with Priority AAccess lanes at AA gates is that as an Exec Plat, Platinum or AAirPass member, you receive priority boarding privileges regardless of whether thereÂ’s a designated lane for elite travelers or not.
It should also be pointed out that the likely intended business benefit of the Priority AAccess program is to increase customer satisfaction/loyalty around AAÂ’s high value customers through the creation of a differentiated end-to-end airport experience for elite AA travelers. As with any of the benefits one receives with their AA status, a benefit is only realized when you choose to implement it. If elite travelers forfeit their benefit of segmented boarding privileges, then thatÂ’s their choice and not the fault of AA, the gate agents or the lack of a formalized IT structure around the process. The reality is that the idea of segmented boarding lanes at the gate is just not a good business idea when AA already provides priority boarding for its elite members. AA will likely learn this lesson and trim the Priority AAccess privileges back to just check-in and security.
In terms of welcoming the increased development of formalized IT based business processes, itÂ’s hard to make the case against such development. For instance, there are very few itinerary/travel processes that cannot easily and quickly be done from my iPhone. This capability is something I value and use. As AA continues to streamline its processes, itÂ’s my responsibility to discover the new capabilities and use the most beneficial ones- i.e. last year I setup my AA IVR profile so when I call customer service, the IVR can quickly provide me specific travel information without my having to enter in any information or talk with an customer service agent. AA can increase the overall adoption of their IT based processes through education, but itÂ’s only the processes that add direct customer value that will stick with its customer base. Unfortunately, it appears Priority AAccess at AA gates is not one of these processes.
And I have what I’d like to imagine is one of the few dual autographed copies.
I attended a Champy book signing event at Index & lurking quietly on the side (while Champy sat in front of a huge pyramid of the books) was Mike Hammer.
The system by AA was introduced in the UK, although we tend to follow the rules being polite Brits! The gate attendants will turn away people who are too arrogant to wait in line.
I would let IT take over, scan your boarding card and “computer says no” No human decision necessary in the brave new world.
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