I took this photo on my last visit to Home Depot.  I like to use the “self-checkout” terminal that allows you to scan the bar codes on your items and pay through a credit card pad.

The system works fine—much better than the insanely complicated one in my local grocery store.  You buy some light bulbs, a jug of windshield fluid, the new doorknob for the guest room—all you have to do is scan the barcodes.

The problem the photo illustrates is that there is a fatal flaw in the system.  If you scan your debit card (or like me, a bank card which is both debit and credit card) and enter your debit card PIN number,  the system stops.  It seems that the software to handle debit cards was never implemented.

There’s a single clerk who handles six lanes of self-service, stepping in when someone is confused, or does something out of step—or, just  following the instructions on the screen, enters a PIN number.

How many times have you seen a work-around like this in a store?  The system works to a point, but some function was never implemented, and it’s left to Larry the Assistant Store Manager to walk around with some duct tape and a Sharpie and tape over a button or put some over-riding message like this one on a $800 terminal running $1 million worth of POS software.

I offer this piece of customer experience to you this morning for four reasons:

1. We’ve all seen this kind of work-around.  It’s endemic in implementations of large software / hardware systems.  The systems work, but only up to a point.   We need to learn to think and communicate internally to build systems that don’t need duct tape and Sharpies.
2. The lost productivity and increased customer frustration probably isn’t figured into the ROI, even though they are very real effects of the system.
3. By implication this photo says that the real solution—implementing debit cards or at least removing debit PIN commands from the terminals—is just such a big problem that no one can solve it.  It’s hopeless.
4. Big software systems that are implemented across enterprises are still misunderstood by most senior management.  General managers in large corporations are grocery people, or paint people or hotel people—not software managers.

We will live with these goofball work-arounds forevermore.  I’d like to see the business schools and other graduate programs begin training managers in technology as one of the two or three fundamental skills they learn in school.

With the advent of cloud computing, Web services, and service-oriented architecture, we’re into a new era of systems development.  If the Home Depot point of sale system for self-checkout were implemented today the Debit card problem might not have occurred.

Think of all the duct tape and Sharpies that would have saved.

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