Call Center Technology: IT/OT, Ethics, and Enterprise Systems

Introduction: Call Centers and the IT/OT Convergence

Call centers have become a vital component of business today and employ several million people worldwide. Their increasing role in operations has made them a target for researchers studying operations management across several fields, including capacity planning, personnel scheduling, queuing, and forecasting. Furthermore, with the advancement of information technology and telecommunications, new challenges have arisen that call centers around the world must face, as various technologies have complicated their operations (Aksin, Armony & Mehrotra, 2007).

Operations Technology (OT) helps in the creation of physical value as well as in the manufacturing process. It consists of sensors, software, and devices needed for the control and monitoring of equipment in a plant, as well as the plant as a whole. Information Technology (IT), on the other hand, brings together all the required pieces of technology to assist in the processing of information. The last decade saw several companies manage IT and OT as independent entities with different technology protocols, governance models, organizational units, and stacks. Nonetheless, recent years have seen OT continuously adopt IT-related technologies. For instance, IP (Internet Protocol) is increasing in popularity as an all-inclusive networking protocol, while Windows™ is becoming more widely used across several devices. The convergence of OT and IT is bringing the benefits of their combined use to the attention of executives, as costs and risks are reduced and performance and flexibility improved (ATOS, 2012).

Organizations have the independent will to choose which technology to adopt, and so they must not rush to take up technologies simply because competitors are using them. The adoption of technologies must be evaluated on its own merit. This calls for strong leadership and the willingness to evaluate significant and relevant factors without bias or prejudice (Septer, 2013).

Issues in a Technical Environment

Cybersecurity

The security of an organization's infrastructure depends on the soundness and reliability of its critical components. Cybersecurity threats seek to exploit the rising complexity of infrastructure systems. Much like reputational and financial risk, cybersecurity risk tends to affect an organization's bottom line. It can increase costs tremendously and reduce revenue. An organization can be critically harmed by a cyberattack, and its ability to gain new customers and retain existing ones can be greatly diminished (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2014).

Systems Issues

The design, development, and implementation of an Information System (IS) is neither easy nor straightforward. Reports indicate that IS projects have an unusually high failure rate, and there has been increasing concern about why this is the case. The answer lies in the fact that the nature of Information Systems failures has not yet been adequately understood. It is a relatively complex process involving several interacting parts, creating a particularly cumbersome combination. Furthermore, new problems frequently arise when previous problems were not resolved at the root, leading to a situation where difficulties continually compound (Raza & Standing, 2008).

Other contributing factors include the following (Septer, 2013):

First, processes that are not documented completely from end to end within an organization lead to inefficiencies and delays. Second, there are several inconsistencies where well-defined governance policies and guidelines are lacking. Third, knowledge workers in an organization tend to waste significant man-hours searching for relevant information or developing workarounds for the pieces of information they need.

Enterprise Technology Management: Best Practices

Enterprise systems are typically generic solutions whose design reflects assumptions about how companies generally operate. Developers tend to systematize them to reflect best practices. The problem arises when users have no say in what constitutes a best practice during development — it is the vendor who defines what those best practices are. Such assumptions can lead to a system that runs against the interests of the organization using it (Davenport, 1998).

The configuration of an enterprise system involves making trade-offs, balancing wants and needs, and operating within the constraints the system allows. The following two configuration models can be adopted (Davenport, 1998):

1. Modules

A majority of enterprise systems are modular, allowing an organization to deploy the system for some functions but not all. There are cases where a company genuinely does not need a particular module — a service organization, for instance, is unlikely to need a manufacturing module. In other cases, modules are rendered unnecessary because the organization already has a working system for the function that module performs. Generally, the higher the number of selected modules, the greater the benefits of integration, but also the higher the risks, changes, and costs involved.

2. Configuration Tables

A configuration table allows a company to customize various aspects of a system to suit how it operates. An organization can choose, for instance, the mode of inventory accounting — LIFO or FIFO — and the way it wants to recognize revenue, whether by location, distribution channel, or product line. Complex enterprise system offerings include large numbers of configuration tables; SAP's R/3, for instance, has 3,000. Working through all of them can take a considerable amount of time — Dell Computer, for instance, reportedly spent more than one year on the exercise.

Besides having serious implications for the strategic goals of an organization, enterprise systems also impact organizational culture. The provision of real-time and universal access to financial and operating data has allowed for the streamlining of management structures through the creation of dynamic and flexible organizations. On the contrary, the centralization of information control and the standardization of processes are qualities found mostly in command-and-control, hierarchical organizations (Davenport, 1998).

Handling Ethical Challenges

Call centers have been widely studied. There are ethical issues to address when examining the monitoring of electronic performance. A dilemma arises: "Is it ethical for a call center manager to monitor an employee's performance using electronic performance monitoring (EPM) data collected on that employee?" Using Kantian, virtue, covenantal, and utilitarian ethical theories, an ethical decision model can be applied to evaluate this dilemma (Perkins, 2013).

A call center comprises both human and technological resources that help deliver services over the phone. Managers seeking to raise the productivity of their call centers have long used EPM. The goal of such a process is to evaluate employee performance. Quantitative data — such as average call time, average call duration, and type of calls — are collected to help managers gauge employee productivity. EPM can therefore lead to conflict between employees and management. Employees may become concerned about their personal wellbeing as managers continually push for specific performance goals using data collected about them. An interesting scenario thus arises where the system managers use to increase productivity is simultaneously undermining employee morale. If this is the case, then the ethical question of whether using performance data gathered on employees to drive productivity increases is justified becomes even weightier.

Covenantal ethics attempts to address contingencies and vulnerabilities in the relationship between managers and employees as it concerns EPM. The ethical decision model suggests that EPM can function well in call centers within a structure where a covenantal relationship between call center managers and employees exists. Integrity, respect, and empathy are virtues that can lead to greater managerial commitment to employees, thereby eliciting positive responses from them. How employees perceive the fairness of management in its use of EPM is critically important, as it will directly affect employee performance (Perkins, 2013).

References

Aksin, Z., Armony, M., & Mehrotra, V. (2007). The modern call center: A multi-disciplinary perspective on operations management research. Production and Operations Management, 665–688.

ATOS. (2012). The convergence of IT and operations technology. ATOS.

Davenport, T. (1998, August). Putting the enterprise into the system. Harvard Business Review.

International Institute for Sustainable Development. (1992). Business strategy for sustainable development: Leadership and accountability for the 90s. World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Laskowski, N. (2014, February). Overcoming the big data bottleneck caused by data in transit. Retrieved from Search CIO:

Lech, P. (2014). Enterprise system implementation from the functional consultants' perspective. The Electronic Journal Information Systems Evaluation, 36–46.

National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2014). Framework for improving critical infrastructure cybersecurity.

Perkins, D. (2013). Electronic performance monitoring in call centers: An ethical decision model. Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies, 4–14.

Raza, S., & Standing, C. (2008). Systemic problems in information technology adoption and use: A systems thinking perspective. Edith Cowan University Conference Proceedings. Edith Cowan University.

Septer, J. (2013). The importance of an enterprise information management strategy. In P. Baan, Enterprise information management: When information becomes inspiration (pp. 43–78). Incentro.