Chapter 6. The Customer Zone

One day, my wife and I went to a local electronics superstore (that shall remain nameless) to resolve a problem with our credit statement. After waiting in line for about 30 minutes, we finally got to the service desk. The young lady at the desk listened patiently as my wife explained the problem, typed a few commands into her terminal, and then informed us without a trace of sarcasm, “We're just the customer service department—we can't help you here.”

Her manager overheard this exchange and whisked her off to perform some pressing function in the back room. After some further discussion, we eventually resolved our problem. Every business relies on the patronage of its customers. Making sure that customers can get what they want, when they want it, should be everyone's job (even customer service's.)

Within a large company's IT department, there is rarely (if ever) any interaction with actual customers. Although there is a tendency to characterize the managers in departments that depend on IT services (such as sales, marketing, customer support, and finance) as “customers,” in reality, they lack the one attribute that true customers have: the ability to go elsewhere.

Despite all threats and dire warnings, the number of cases in which a company has actually disbanded its own internal IT department and outsourced its critical business functions are few and far between. So, whether you're building applications to serve your peers within the company or to serve the actual consumers of your company's products, the goal is still to build systems that are flexible enough to meet current and future as-yet-unidentified business needs.