Yesterday I had to deposit a check. My bank, Chase, has begun rolling out new “deposit-friendly” ATMs that require neither envelope nor deposit slip for check-only deposits. The process is shockingly simple. Here’s what I had to do:

1. Select Deposit from the on-screen menu
2. Insert the endorsed check into a slot, just as I would insert a dollar bill into a vending machine
3. When I saw an image of the check on-screen, enter its amount [2008/07/02 UPDATE - It gets even better. I discovered today that it actually OCRs the check amount! After I inserted a handwritten check this morning it magically asked me to confirm whether the amount it read on it was correct. It was! I deposited two other checks and it asked me to enter the check amount, indicating that it couldn't read the amounts or it didn't have a high degree of confidence in its scan, so it didn't waste my time asking me to confirm them. I assume OCR would work nearly 100% of the time on machine-generated checks.]
4. Repeat for any additional checks
5. Press Done
6. Get receipt showing an image of my check(s)

Here’s what I DIDN’T have to do:

1. Fill out a deposit slip, which means I didn’t need to…
2. Find a working pen, which I would need if I could…
3. Remember my checking account number, which I never do, so I used to have to…
4. Wait in line for a teller to give me my checking account number, before I could…
5. Check the under-copies of the deposit slip to make sure nobody leaned hard and smushed their deposit info down into my slip or surreptitiously wrote in their account number to scam me into depositing my check into their account. (And to think some people trust paper.)

Chase saw a process where a machine that is already operating in a high-security and high-knowledge context asked me to write down the account number it already knows on a piece of paper it can’t read and seal it into an envelope it can’t open. What a wonderfully archaic set of steps to get rid of!

For me the customer, life is now clearly simpler, but what about the poor machine? Like all banks, Chase is very comfortable with ATM software and hardware, but surely the addition of machine-reading and imaging each check makes the ATM vastly more complicated and error-prone, yes? Well, no. Every check in the U.S. banking system has the issuing bank’s routing number, account number, and check number printed along the bottom in a standard Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) format designed for accurate high-speed scanning. Banks have been whipping checks around and reading those numbers all day every day for decades. And the check image I saw onscreen and printed on my receipt? They’ve been doing that for years as well. When’s the last time you got actual cancelled checks back in your statement? What might seem like an incredibly complex and high-risk project for you or me was to Chase essentially sticking together a few very familiar Lego pieces they’d used a million times.

Any time you see a business process that asks for information it either already knows, already should know, or can easily find out for itself, there is an opportunity for vastly improving the user experience. When you further see that you can do so with technologies you already live and breathe, to me it reads like the story of the perfect development project. Let’s review:

• First, there was a clear customer benefit: Customers will spend a lot less time doing tedious and error-prone steps that do not benefit them.
• Second, there was a clear client benefit: Bank staff will spend a lot less time looking up account numbers, opening envelopes and deciphering handwriting on incorrectly filled out deposit slips, and making sure the ATM kiosk is stocked with envelopes and deposit slips. Chase will also spend a lot less money buying and almost immediately disposing of NINETEEN MILLION deposit envelopes a year.
• Lastly, from an IT standpoint, the requirements are clear and the risk is low: Get rid of all that paper by gluing together all these things we already know very well.

Dare I say it, this project sounds fun! Unfortunately, not all IT projects are such no-brainers. It’s not uncommon for a project to be approved with only two of those three stars, or sometimes even one. Maybe it benefits the client and the customer, but it’s going to be a huge and risky endeavor to implement. Maybe it will be a huge pain to implement and actually infuriate the customers, but the cost savings make it worthwhile (“Your call is important to us. Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed”).

In my experience, the one-star and two-star projects tend to come from an incomplete understanding of the business problem, either by IT or frequently from the business itself. Sometimes clients don’t really know what they want. Sometimes they’re too close to the action to think long-term. Sometimes they don’t understand technology at all. And sometimes we in IT just don’t ask, because we’re too busy trying to keep production up and running while watching Twitter feeds of the iPhone 3G announcement. I’m just saying.

No matter how it happens, if you simply treat isolated problems as isolated technology projects, you’ll get paid for your work, and life will go on. However, a deeper relationship with your client lets you do so much more. Understanding your client’s business plans and long-term goals lets you and your client both see the big picture. You’ll be surprised to see how this wider worldview leads to a more holistic approach to these seemingly tactical technical problems (“the ATMs fill up with deposit envelopes by 11:30. Make it hold more.”) When you do that, you’ll see that those one and two star problems can often be rearranged into three star solutions that make everybody happy. Sometimes so happy that they’re inspired to stay up late writing paeans to something as mundane as a deposit-friendly ATM.