Three Lessons I Learned while Upgrading My OS System by chris jones
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his month, a cautionary tale about how important constant presence is in business, how important it is to continually improve (and be cautious about how you do it), and how thin the margin between getting a deal and losing it. A few weeks ago, those of us who are iProduct users (I’m an iPad guy) upgraded our operating systems to the newest version, version 6. Along with this, the associated app makers had to make certain tweaks to their programs so they would still run correctly. Many of them released immediate updates. Some of them didn’t. One of my favorite programs is a Twitter client. The day of the update, it stopped working. It would load, but then crash. I downloaded three new clients that day, and tried them all. One of them did what I wanted it to do and did not crash, and I’m using that client now. That’s the bald tale. There are three lessons here. First Lesson: The update of the operating system. Business is interconnected in the modern world in ways that are unpredictable and potentially dangerous. We, as service providers, need to be aware of the effects changing
our business will have on other related businesses. Brokers and bankers alike have to think carefully about the changes they make to their processes and systems, because those changes can have potentially catastrophic repercussions to those in the field. With this operating system change, I have to say, I don’t notice that there’s any difference in the performance of my device. Nothing materially has changed. But there are huge differences in the performance of dependent systems, like my apps, that make them in some cases cease to work at all. Beware of changing things just to change them. Sometimes – more often than we think – changing things just makes them different, not better. And it is easily possible to make them worse. This is a tale that the government, and most especially the overlords at the CFPB, need to hear. We’re in the middle of our third or fourth redesign of the Good Faith Estimate in the last five years. None of the previous changes have made things easier or better for mortgage consumers. The last revision is, in my opinion, nothing less than a dereliction of duty on the part of the regulators. It is a complete, unmitigated, untrammeled disaster. It has made it significantly more difficult for good loan officers to TheNicheReport.com
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