Consultants are obliged to eat their own dog food, or so the saying goes. Given the high esteem in which the IT class holds consultants, being considered canine is, relatively speaking, a compliment.
So at the risk of having readers think this column is going to the dogs, I have to modify a long-held position promoted here for years. If I didn’t, I’d just have to modify a different position promoted for just as long.
What isn’t changing is a core principle — that there is no such thing as best practice, only practices that fit circumstances best. Everything depends on context.
What is changing is that internal customers aren’t pure evil anymore. There is a circumstance where the internal customer concept is a good fit.
Go back to basic economics — namely, the nature of marketplaces, which is where buying, selling, and customers reside. Marketplaces optimize the allocation of resources — the balance of supply and demand.
So here’s the syllogism: The major premise is that by having internal customers you’ve created an IT marketplace. The minor premise is that marketplaces optimize resource allocation. The inescapable conclusion is that treating the rest of the business as a collection of internal customers optimizes IT resource allocation.
To make this all work, the rest of the business has to actually be a bunch of customers. They have to pay you (and each other, when appropriate) for the products and services they use, and they have to be free to take their business elsewhere. You have to be allowed to price your services so that you can afford to deliver whatever service someone elsewhere in the business is willing to pay for.
Very important: The people running the business can’t hold you accountable for bad investments in information technology. That’s no longer your job, any more than Home Depot is responsible for the consequences of your decision to paint exterior walls with interior paint.
Even more important: End-users still aren’t your customers. That hasn’t changed, and won’t. Customers make buying decisions. End-users are consumers — a different role entirely.
If budget managers are your customers, the thorny problem of IT resource allocation — most of the IT governance process — goes away entirely. They pay, you deliver. Otherwise, you don’t get involved. Your scope of responsibility is limited to delivering working software and services that meet specifications. Whether any of it does the business any good at all is Someone Else’s Problem.
Sounds attractive, doesn’t it?
Does this mean the new official position of Keep the Joint Running is that you should make a 180 degree change and treat the rest of the enterprise as your internal customer?
Nope. The new official position is, it depends. If the enterprise’s most significant challenge is resource allocation, go right ahead.
But …
Markets optimize resource allocation and only resource allocation. They’re useless for establishing and pursuing a shared purpose, and for managing shared resources. Which is to say: The business community has done an admirable job of recognizing unmet needs and addressing them. But it took government to launch the space program. To establish the interstate highway system. To build the Internet. And to protect the environment, the stock market, and the food supply — from business.
In terms relevant to the business you serve, if everyone in the business is each other’s customer, the enterprise’s ability to act with strategic purpose will become, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent.
And your ability to maintain a coherent architecture will be severely reduced. A scenario to illustrate the point: Marketing decides to define “customer” in terms of households. Marketing is your customer; you comply. A year later, Customer Service needs its call center agents to see which callers received which recent marketing campaigns. That’s just too bad: Marketing only needs households, and isn’t willing to spend the additional money to maintain individual customer data for the benefit of a different department.
Then there’s the need to create and maintain an internal billing system — full employment for accountants, but zilcho on the value scale for the company.
If the people running the business think it can succeed by having every department in the company buy and sell services from each other like some crowded bazaar, they’ll turn internal politics into a strategy, governance into game-playing, and competition into something that happens inside the corporate organizational chart. But if that’s their decision, you have no choice.
Set up your stall and start selling.