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Abstract:

With the increasing emphasis on business awareness, we are all asked to play a more active role in interfacing with customers, both internal as well as external. This new role poses a challenge for those of us who may need guidance to improve their effectiveness in customer interaction. Who is the customer of an IT professional? We say the customer is anyone to whom the professional makes a value-producing promise. This applies not only to the ordinary notion of someone purchasing a product or a service but also to users of software systems, to clients of IT professionals, to students of IT teachers, and team members with each other and their team leaders. [Denning+01] As Gerald Weinberg [Karten94] has noted: How could an industry as large as the information industry get so far removed from its customers? As industries go, we are large, but we are new. In our short history, we’ve seen numerous cases of systems development in which a job estimated at ten thousand dollars wound up costing a hundred thousand dollars. We’ve asked for a two-page report on sales of steak and gotten a thousand pages on sales of everything from hamburgers to steers. Our customers expect little from us, or expect the wrong things, and in this they’re not disappointed. We thought that as our technical prowess grew, our customers would be happier, but they aren’t. To match our increasing ability to produce excellent systems, we need to increase our ability to manage our customer’s expectations.

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