Day 16

21st Century Skills

Accept ownership for actions

The Iowa Core Curriculum has identified a set of skills as important in the 21st Century. These skills are seperated into five areas:

(1) civic literacy
(2) employability skills
(3) financial literacy
(4) health literacy
(5) technology literacy

One of the employability skills is accepting ownership for actions. Today I had an opportunity to practice this skill. We were building promotions that we were going to test in our "lab." Evidently the stores that you can send promotions to depends upon who you are. Different users are given different permissions. When I had seen this trained the step where you specifify the store was a largely moot step. The only store that it could be created for was the store we were in. However, today we were logged in as someone with much more permission.

The default for stores is all stores. One of the promotions we built rewarded the customer with 95% off of their total bill if they spent at least $5. Within four minutes of saving our promotion, the phones began ringing. A few things made this less serious than it could have been.

1) There are only currently three stores live on this application.
2) It was early in the morning and not a prime shopping time.
3) The discount, 95%, was easily detected. As I pointed out later, had we set the discount to be 5%, the problem may not have been detected for a long time. (That's the optimist in me, always looking on the bright side.)
4) The promotion can be suspended with a click of the mouse.

One store knew something was wrong when the register gave the customer a $67 discount. The bill had been for $70.53.

We, of course, took responsibility for our part in the fiasco. Our supervisor, also was very apologetic and forthright in accepting responsibility with the stores.