Whom Do We Serve? July 20, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Customer Service, Leadership, Tools, Users
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I took my own advice and got out of the office for a few days. While I’m away, I’m republishing some posts from the early days of this blog that most readers have never seen. This post was first published in January, 2008 and still has relevance as we continuously define the role of IT in our companies.
Last year, CIO magazine published a piece by Kumud Kalia that encourages CIOs to redefine the meaning of “customer” to be their company’s actual external customers. I couldn’t disagree more.
Your customer is the individual or entity to whom you are providing service. Nothing more, nothing less. For years, we’ve been working hard to get (traditionally insular) IT organizations to recognize their customers, build those relationships, and provide good service. In this model, the customers are those employees that use IT services to design things, build things, sell things, and service things, meeting the needs of external customers.
Kalia contends that this is wrong, and that IT should instead focus directly on those external customers. By skipping past all those other employees that really do focus on the external customers, IT is somehow supposed to be a direct contributor the the company’s success. I’d argue that if you could really succeed with this model, you don’t need all those other people in the middle, and that IT should run the whole show.
(I notice that Kalia wears two hats: he is both CIO and EVP of Operations for Direct Energy. With all due respect, I believe he may be blurring the line between two very different jobs.)
In reality, those “other people in the middle” bring huge value to the company. They spend their time really focusing on and understanding the external customer needs. They figure out what the external customer wants, and they translate that into internal business requirements to meet those needs. IT, in turn, provides tools, processes, and systems that meet those internal business requirements as cheaply and effectively as possible.
I’m not saying that IT should never interact with real external customers. In some cases, that can be truly enlightening in our quest to provide the very best tools and systems to our real internal customers. But I would never have IT participate in an external customer relationship without appropriate oversight from the real owner of the relationship, such as sales, marketing, or support.
In short, IT builds tools. Other use those tools to get their jobs done. The better we build and support our tools, the better those other people perform. We make the hammers; others drive the nails. Together we make houses.
The original version of this post can be found here.
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Completely agree. All too often we forget why our IT was created, and start to value process over outcome. It’s good to be reminded that the business is not there to keep the IT department busy. My favorite part of my on-boarding at DHL Systems (many years ago) was the “follow the package” day. You’d eyeball a package come in over the retail counter, then follow it to its destination, riding shotgun all the way. (This is was in the days before health and safety concerns killed off riding jump seat in cargo planes.) It gave you a great sense of why you were there.
I want both. Firstly I am here to deliver benefit to the business and ultimately that means helping to increase sales, reduce costs and develop customer loyalty through the systems and processes that I design and deliver. Secondly to truely do the first I have to understand customers as well as my operations and business counterparts. Part of the problem in the past was that IT didn’t understand the end customer and therefore lacked credibility when it was proposing solutions to problems the business wanted to solve. Often this resulted in IT being told just build this and make it cheap rather than a partnership which leverages both business insight and technology to deliver a better solution for the overall business and in the end this is the consumer that generates the companies revenues.
I believe that we interpret the IT in your post in a larger sense that what was intended. If we use your definition of a customer as “the individual or entity to whom you are providing service”, I agree with you that a majority of IT customers are internal ones and they should be serviced as real customers. However, IT is more and more a business function, directly contributing to the business in collaboration (partnership?) with others. In this aspect, the focus on external customers is well placed and should be encouraged.
We all recognize without the ultimate customer receiving excellent products and services the issue of IT’s focus is irrelevant. IT must deliver internal value and develop credibility to be able to gain access to the source of corporate revenue. The simple yet effective recognition that when internal buyers of the IT resources are well served, the ultimate source of corporate profit will benefit. If IT is aligned with the business strategy and can clearly measure achievement against the objectives, definition of who is the client is neutralized.
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