Devil’s Advocate: You're never alone with a portal

Portal technology married to self service for staff and customers is a great step forward, says Martin Brampton. But should we be wary of increasingly less frequent human interaction?

When we think about self service the term 'paradigm shift' is, for once, perhaps justified. Only half a decade ago, shops had counters with staff and the goods were firmly behind the counter. Customers never dreamt of touching the pumps in filling stations, they were strictly staff only.

Self service was little use in the computer world until systems became widely accessible - although the banks stole a march on most people, with the cash machine widely used long before the personal computer. In fact, it was to drive dedicated devices like the ATM that microprocessors were developed. Later, the ATM transformed itself into a disguised personal computer.

The banks led the way with computer-based self service. It made a lot of sense. In the days before ubiquitous word processing, I could always tell when the bank sent me a marketing letter, because it had no typing errors. The automated transactions like cheque clearing used to run smoothly but whenever bank staff got involved, errors crept in. So, it was logical to give the customers direct access to the computer systems.

There is a downside. The friendly, local bank manager is as mythologised as the Hovis hill but at least there was somebody to talk to. And somebody who could be relied on to sort out problems eventually by the application of common sense. Now, the banks have dispensed with local managers and most counter staff are either expensive automata or sales people.

Often, the banks went too far. In the old system of management, groups had defined responsibilities and the wherewithal to discharge them. As call centres were introduced, a yawning chasm often opened. I was forced to give up on one major bank after 20 years, when their new processing centre started losing letters. That was manageable, until a call centre was interposed that had no capability to actually do anything. Their only suggestion was to resend the letter, so that the bank could lose it all over again.

Big corporations have now decided that employees need self service and that a portal is the way to do it. It can make sense. Surprisingly, designers of computer systems have often ignored one of the simplest rules of efficient operation. Rather than emulating existing processes, it is nearly always best to apply the rule that data be captured as close to source as possible and reports be delivered as directly as may be achieved.

Who knows best about basic employee information, such as home address? Or, maybe even more critical, who knows the employee's bank details for salary payments? Why distribute payslips, if you can simply make the information available on demand to every member of staff? Once employees are regularly checking with the portal, all those boring staff manuals full of rules and regulations can be put online too, saving huge printing and distribution costs.

There are questions to be asked, though. As we encourage the idea that every communication is best handled through a computer, what kind of culture do we create? Sometimes people have looked to computers to promote democracy, or even anarchy, as in the early days of public access to the internet. But corporate systems seem more likely to emphasise the use of regulated structures to concentrate power in a few hands.

Lip service is paid to individual empowerment but the reality is often moving in the opposite direction. Strictly defined processes have a kind of efficiency but sometimes only on too narrow a view. The bank that streamlined everything into a call centre no doubt thought it was efficient, but it lost customers who could no longer rely on staff to use their initiative in solving problems.

Indeed, the wider implications include the enormous time now spent keeping up with email. That combines with the fact that people are much less cautious about what they say in emails than face to face. The result can be strained relationships, lowered morale and reduced efficiency. And that is without even mentioning questions about whether our lives should be judged solely by economic criteria.

So, maybe self service is as inevitable as David Blunkett's identity cards. And I like browsing among the goods without a sales assistant breathing down my neck. But we might still want to ask some questions about just how much of our lives we want to consist in interactions with computer screens rather than human beings.