My colleague, friend and Atlanta neighbour, Frank Capek has started his excellent blog Customer Innovations examining the exciting domain of innovating the customer experience. This perspective – embodying, among other things, a shift from “inside-out” to “outside-in” thinking has much to offer to IT organizations striving to climb the Business-IT Maturity curve.
Below mid-Level 2, most IT organizations are horribly internally focused – customers are often called “users,” connoting the narcotic characteristics of information technology (once you’ve tried it, you’re hooked!) and the less-than-customer-centric behaviors of drug dealers. Just look at entries in Service Catalogs, or look at the line items on the billing statements sent by IT organizations to their customers. Service Catalog entries are composed from an internal perspective – not one that is “user friendly” – composed in terms that resonate to the customer experience. Billing statements list items that are often described in arcane IT terms. They tell the customer nothing about the real value of what is being delivered, or how they, as customer, can influence their costs. I recall the old (very old!) days of early mainframe computing, when, as an end user, I received a monthly IT bill based on the number of EXCP’s I had consumed. It took me months to find out what an EXCP was, and I never really did figure out how to influence it – some months I used a boatload of EXCP’s, and other months, hardly any – and yet my work patterns had not changed that months. (For any of you out there less than 60 years old who were not involved in IBM mainframes, an EXCP means “execute channel program.” I won’t even attempt to explain it beyond that point!)
To get through Level 2 and into Level 3, IT professionals must be skilled at understanding the “IT customer experience” – the lens through which their customers see them, and take a fully customer-centric approach that is engineered to create a superior customer experience. This is another example of “sticking points” I have tried to point out in many of these posts. You can’t shift from an inside-out to an outside-in perspective by working harder. You need a 180 degree shift in perspective – to be able to get inside your customer’s heads.
With that, I’ll hand back to Mr. Capek and his powerful evolving body of research and consulting in the Customer Experience domain.
Filed under: IT Management, IT Maturity | Tagged: customer billing, Customer experience, service catalog
