Annals of Reengineering

For some of you, this will be the first issue of the Faculty Newsletter you received through the Institute mail this year. For all of you, this issue will likely have been delayed in delivery by some arbitrary time.

A Reengineered Institute mailing list in combination with a Reengineered (and thus overworked and understaffed) Mail Services has resulted in an often delayed and for all-too-many of you non-delivered Faculty Newsletter. The staff of the Newsletter sincerely apologizes to all who have been adversely affected, and particularly encourage those of you missing back issues to contact us for their replacement.

We have been trying to resolve these problems. Partially at the encouragement of the Newsletter a recent on-line mailing labels ordering feature has been added to the MIT Website. This has speeded up the often interminable delay (and necessary multiplicity of required requisitions) prior to the printing of Institute mailing labels. In addition, close work with personnel involved in the generating of the lists has (we hope) returned many of our "lost" readers to the fold.

Working out the problem of delayed delivery of the Newsletter appears to be a bit more complicated. A hierarchy of labeling and mailing priorities exists at Mail Services to accommodate mailing priorities (Tech Talk, messages from administrative officers, etc.). This has resulted in as much as a week's delay between delivery of the Newsletter to the Institute and its appearance in your Distributed Mail Center(!). Due to cost cutting in the Reengineering of Mail Services there are now simply no personnel available to expedite the process. (It should be noted that the Mail Services people with whom we've worked over the years continue to do an outstanding job and appear restricted by regulations and lack of sufficient work force.)

Mail Services has probably received the most general criticism of all aspects of Reengineering (SAP, notwithstanding). A target visible to all, its elimination of personal service in conjunction with its "return-from-the-dead" mail delivery (where people who have been out of your office, the Institute, or the planet for years suddenly begin receiving mail) has left it somewhat vulnerable. Perhaps a reevaluation is in order.

So again, to those who have failed to receive past issues of the Newsletter we apologize, and say "welcome back.". And for those who would like to read the Newsletter in a more timely fashion, we point you to our Website, <http://web.mit.edu/fnl>.