Information Technology: Who is the Customer?

If you have ever worked for a large company, you probably fall into one of two sides to the following scenario: you are either a user of Information Technology (IT) services, or an administrator. You're either powerless, or all-powerful.

With the consumerization of IT, that model has begun to change. The "users" consume IT services in their personal lives, and have questioned why IT can't provide better service. Furthermore they react to IT the way they might against a service monopoly or duopoly, and jump at any chance to subvert or work around the system.

Meanwhile, IT professionals have been faced with fewer resources, with various functions outsourced, offshore, and with few dollars all around, all while being told to treat "users" as "customers", to hear the "voice of the customer", and be more "responsive" to "customer needs".

This begets the question: who is the customer?

Typically, in any business, the customer is the one who pays the bills. You order a sandwich, you're the customer. You buy a car, you're the customer. Being a customer is great in service economies, where firms compete on who can provide the best service. The customer is King (or Queen).

However, in a large company, the consumer of these services is not necessarily the customer. Services are provided to these consumers in order for them to perform their jobs. Services such as email, network access, and software distribution are consumed by employees but ultimately paid for by the company - which in turn ultimately means the shareholders.

Whether publicly or privately held, a company exists to increase shareholder value (more broadly stakeholders, if you lean European).

Why is this an important distinction? The consumers of IT and the customers of IT amy conflict, or have different priorities. Often this results in IT getting caught in the middle, enforcing the requirements of one at the expense of the other. I'll give two examples.

One example would be a group of product developers who need to collaborate with external teams, ether as part of a joint venture or a contractual relationship. The technology consumers want to share files easily, perhaps through a third party cloud solution such as DropBox. However, the customers - the owners - have very clear concerns about intellectual property and other sensitive data being stored, and have explicit policies against storing data on external solutions. The result is additional administrivia for the consumers to work through in order to get their external teams access to commonly shared data. Curse you IT for making life so hard!

Another example would be cost modeling for a product platform - let's say some sort of database the company will sell access to. This will be a revenue-generating product. A hosting center offers a solution for $3,000 a year. The internal IT group, after months of review, says they can do it for $24,000 a year. On that basis clearly the first option is the better one, but are these apples-to-apples comparisons? The consumers are the only ones who see both offerings, and the first excludes things they can do without - backups, monitoring solutions, and so on. The customer - the owners - do not want any service outages for this product. Without these additional services, any outage could go on for hours, even days.

The customer model in IT is similar to the insurance industry: the consumer of services does not pay for them, or pays for them indirectly. I is easy to ask for better service when it isn't coming out of your pocket. It's also easy to be led astray by lower prices that do not offer the same level of service. Technology aside, I expect this will be the next transformation of IT: how to clarify costs and facilitate communication between the consumers and the customers of services.