The record

Simon & Schuster. Twenty-one years old, and the method that runs this company today.

The challenge

Lockheed’s customer-satisfaction reviews on the Simon & Schuster account were failing, and nobody inside the operation could say exactly why. Simon & Schuster — Viacom’s publishing arm — was not a client you guess with.

What we ran

The first move wasn’t a system. It was a question: I went to Simon & Schuster’s director-level leadership and asked their pain points. The answer pointed at service delivery. The paper told the rest: the contract promised capabilities the service-level agreements and incident matrices were never built to deliver. Ask the operation where it hurts, then read the systems and the paper against each other — that diagnosis, first run at twenty-one, is the same first move every Converge engagement opens with today.

What held

The operation was rebuilt to deliver what the contract promised: incident coding tightened until a ticket meant one thing — single user down or degraded, multi-user down or degraded, what became SEV-1 and SEV-2 — notification protocols trained into the call-center floor, response thresholds set and then met.

The number

The contract penalties — running thousands of dollars a month — stopped. The customer started flying me to them: Philadelphia, to work with the senior logistics engineers behind their book distribution; Rockefeller Center, to work with executive leadership on operations and policy. They offered a role in New York. I was twenty-one. Found where the contract promised more than it delivered, built the operations that delivered it. They wrote company policy around it. Achieved.

For scale, cited: Simon & Schuster in 2001 put 98 titles on the New York Times bestseller list, 14 of them at number one (Viacom Form 10-K, 2001, SEC); Viacom’s consolidated revenue that year was $23.2 billion (Viacom Form 10-K, 2002, SEC). Financial penalty clauses — service credits — were standard in IT-outsourcing contracts from the mid-1990s on (Computerworld, 2009).

That’s the account. The architecture beneath it — the estate, the control planes, the intervention — is drawn end to end in the architecture edition of this record, one of six in the Enterprise Proof Portfolio.

First-hand: our figures, from our watch. We were in the room — examine any of them on the call.

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