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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Customers make buying decisions. Consumers use products and services. Sometimes they’re the same person. Sometimes they aren’t.

By differentiating between customers and consumers you can explain a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena in business, like why professional sports teams don’t care that strikes and demands for new stadiums (stadia?) have driven the public beyond mere apathy to alpha-state levels. Their major customers are the networks; fans, for the most part, are consumers.

It also explains the poor product quality and “customer” service of many software companies: Software selection is a strategic decision made by IS leadership or the chief technical officer, so when end-users and technicians experience problems and call for support they can’t threaten to take their business elsewhere — it isn’t their decision.

(This distinction, by the way, appears to be an original insight — much to my astonishment, nobody seems to have pointed it out before. If you were my customer instead of my consumer, it could turn me into a wealthy man.)

This distinction is useful inside, as well as outside, the company: Understanding the difference between your internal consumers — the people who make use of the technology you provide to the enterprise — and your internal customers will help you become a more effective leader, and help your career as well.

A recent column pointed this out. Your internal customers aren’t your consumers, they’re the people who approve your budget and who control your career. Some readers weren’t too happy with this analysis: They prefer to eliminate the idea of internal customers altogether. Everyone in IS, in their view, should focus on the connection between their work and external customers (and, presumably, external consumers, too).

This is a position advocated many times in this space: Everyone in IS, and in fact, every employee in the company, should always be aware of how their efforts translate to value for external customers.

The two positions aren’t in conflict, though. They’re complementary, or at least they can be, although keeping all of the connections straight can be a challenge sometimes.

When making decisions, it’s worthwhile to look at the world from more than one perspective. One perspective is that of mission and purpose — what you are trying to accomplish. From this perspective, it’s important to understand your connection to external customers, to provide context for your actions and decisions. IS works best when it relates to the rest of the company as an active partner rather than as a passive order-taker or independent service provider, and to be an active partner you need to participate in interactive discussions about how to achieve business goals. “How can we more effectively attract and retain customers together?” is a better question than, “How can we help you?”

A different, but equally valid, perspective is your responsibility to be politically effective. Even in healthy companies, every individual starts with different premises, experiences, personal and professional goals, and priorities … in short, a unique world view. Politics is the art of moving forward in the face of these differences. With technology pervading most businesses, every business decision leads to new or changed, and always conflicting technical requirements and priorities, so you operate in a highly political environment.

Why should you view the people who control your budget as your internal customers? Because that’s political reality. By definition they are your customers, and if you don’t treat them that way, they won’t make the right buying decisions about your products and services (they won’t approve your budget).

Then, most important of all, there’s a third perspective: your career. You personally have customers, and they’re also internal. They’re the people who approve your raises, bonuses, and promotions.

If you’re lucky, helping the business attract and retain external customers will make your personal internal customers happy. If you aren’t so lucky … well, they’re internal, but they’re still your customers.

It’s up to you to decide how you want to treat them.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I finally watched The Matrix last week. It’s a thought-provoking movie that asks three disturbing questions:

1. Does anyone call what Keanu Reeves does “acting”?

2. Has there ever been a stupider premise than the human body as the ideal source of electrical energy?

3. Does Moore’s Law make the movie’s basic premise inevitable?

We’ll leave the first two questions to Roger Ebert. Before we dig into the third …

Last month I asked what you envisioned as the center of your network, the mainframe or the PC. In other words, is the point of your network to connect terminal devices to the systems that drive them, or is it to connect employees to the resources they need to do their jobs?

The e-mail and forum exchanges on this question surprised me. Most unexpected was that nobody proposed putting processes in the center, even though the process view of the enterprise dominates consulting circles these days. The correspondents who proposed an “acentric” perspective also caught me off-guard, since to me acentrism means no design focus.

What bothered me the most, though, was how many respondents told me the enterprise “never stopped running on the mainframe.” This contingent disputed my assertion that a company’s work is performed by individual human beings, and that companies succeed or fail one person at a time.

On reflection, this isn’t a question of who is right – the question is which perspective is the most useful. With the mainframe in the middle you’d divide work into three categories: Data preparation, where people and feeder systems massage data into processable formats; The Work, which is what host applications do; and exception-handling, which is what people do with system outputs (since the system does The Work, it only reports the exceptions it can’t handle).

With Process in the middle, both humans and information systems fulfill roles in the company’s core processes, performing well-defined tasks that transform inputs into outputs.

Both of these perspectives can be useful. I’ve designed and implemented quite a few successful applications based on the systems-centric view myself, and as mentioned, the process-centric perspective currently dominates business design.

When you put the employee in the middle, though, several good things happen. First, you reduce overhead. Every time one employee hands work to another, entropy happens – work goes into managing the transfer of work rather than getting the work itself done. With a human-centered view you’ll organize resources so work stays on a single desk until it’s done.

Second, customer relationships will improve. When one human being owns each piece of work, the company has a chance of looking less like an impersonal machine that answers all requests with, “We can’t do that – it violates our procedures.”

To understand the third benefit, let’s revisit the basic idea behind The Matrix – that eventually we’ll all be slaves to one or more artificial intelligences. Just thirty years into the future, Moore’s Law will have clicked over twenty times, so computers will be one million times more powerful than they are today. One million.

No matter what the cognitive task, computers will be better at it than you are, so if the mainframe is in the middle, you’ll be working for it. Likewise for process-centered work – computers, being far more capable than humans, will do all the interesting stuff. (In the movie version, we’ll do nothing but cheap manual labor. Fortunately, Microsoft will have written the operating system and our heroes will take back the world when the blue screen of death happens.)

If humans are in the middle, we may have a cable going into our skulls (although I sure hope wireless technology has progressed more by then) but it will be to augment our abilities, not to boss us around.

Okay, this is the stuff of a summer movie, and your choices today will neither save nor destroy the world two decades from now. My point is to illustrate the third benefit of putting humans in the middle of your system designs – you’ll help make your company a better place to work.

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