Customer Service and The Future of IT
July 7, 2008 – 9:40 amJason Hiner wrote this blog post about IT’s changing role, Sanity check: Is IT no longer about technology? at TechRepublic. While I commend him for taking up the question of the changing role of IT, I don’t think Hiner quite understands Tom Austin’s suggestion that the word “social” will become a key part of the IT professional’s job description. I also don’t completely agree with Austin’s thinking on the next evolution of the IT professional. It’s more about customer service than social science or creativity, although those do play a part. More on that in a minute.
Hiner looks three segments into which he says IT will be divided over the next decade.
1.) Operations and infrastructure management
“They will be the blue collar workers of the IT industry…Austin’s argument doesn’t hold up very well in this category.”
Operations and infrastructure management surely are tasked with keeping systems running, but they also have to deal with customers from time to time and this interaction will increase in frequency over the next decade. Virtualization and cloud computing have (and will continue to) shorten deployment times and require less middle men. This will put the Ops teams in closer touch with customers and require them to be more socially adept and more customer service oriented.
I also don’t completely agree with the assessment of operations staff as “blue collar.” That belief is certainly prevalent in large corporations, and it is so to their detriment. Hard working, customer service oriented workers can be hired for operations work, and it shouldn’t be a dead end. The best data center operators are up-and-comers. Professional development and technical training can make data centers incubators for technical talent. Put another way, if we accept that data centers have high staff turnover, why use that churn to the company’s advantage? Use cross-training and customer service development as platforms to reverse brain drain.
2.) Solutions and project management
“Today’s developers and software engineers will morph into this category.”
To that I’d say, “Those who can write code, do. Those who cannot are project managers.” Look, there are developers and there are non-developers. There is a temperament to software engineers that makes them good at what they do. Most will tell you they don’t want to morph into social scientists. That’s ok. The best change that can happen in this category is for IT line managers to become responsible for customer service. Make customer service part of their goals and deliverables. To some extent, that means driving home the point to their directs, but mostly it means creating The Development Abstraction Layer. As Spolsky points out, “Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user.” I can’t do Spolsky’s article justice by quoting further so go read it when you’re done reading this post (only 274 more words to go).
3.) End user management
“In the future, the role of this part of the IT department will diminish, although not entirely disappear.”
The role of end user management will actually increase, not decrease over the next decade. More systems will create more users. Sure, physical systems will become virtual and so on, but the future IT professional needs to be thinking in terms of instances, not physical boxes. More instances equals more users, in one way or another.
“IT will need to relax some of its standards in order to allow more users to easily collaborate and share data and documents.”
The solution isn’t relaxed standards. The solution is writing and enforcing standards and policies that make sense to your organization and business model. There’s no point in enforcing arbitrary standards from another organization (or a past incarnation of your organization).
The IT Customer Service Equation
Like it or not, IT has customers, internal and external, and we have a duty to provide them with both technical and customer service excellence. When IT’s customers are satisfied and can do their jobs more effectively, IT gets a better reputation and isn’t so close to the chopping block at budget time (just one benefit, by the way). See Three Major Myths about IT Professionals for more on that.
IT is not going away, but IT is no longer special. Business models and organizational structures continue to change and IT needs to change with them…and do it with a smile. As the more users appear on the IT radar, the need for customer service excellence, as well as continued technical excellence, increases.