IT sometimes feels like it’s yet to embrace the concept of service. Far too often we hide ourselves behind the specifications, demand requirements. We’re in the business of creating solutions, but more importantly we’re in the service business. Throughout my career too many times I’ve seen the software being sold as a product comparable to a bridge or a house. In fact I’m still occasionally hearing that from senior business analysts at various places. We’re now moving towards embracing software as a concept of a service, but this term stretches far further than simply covering deployment and licensing models.
As young manager of software house I’ve started my journey by asking clients for specifications, delivering solutions as close as possible to the client’s definition of their requirements. Sure, I’ve been helping them defining those requirements and made many recommendations, but in fact I think I was doing a bad job by the very definition of the above. When I was lucky, the relationship with a client lasted for years. Whether they had enough money, patience of if they simply liked dealing with my company because they’ve liked me, I don’t know. The matter of fact is that many clients just couldn’t cope. Of course my clients could and have been specifying every single detail of the product they were ordering in my business, but only few had guts to admit years after that they’ve never knew what they were doing. Some played the blame game for “failed” products that did not match the requirements. Truth to be said, neither of us knew where we were going with the products we’ve been delivering. Not to the extent where we couldn’t still get smarter for the next release. In fact every and only successful implementations seen more features being requested along the way. The more widely used the systems were, the more users they’ve gained and the more error reports and feature requests were being posted. Rightly or wrongly, no client wanted to hear moaning about having to get back to the drawing board every five minutes, but definitely no one wanted to hear that spotted space for improvement was down to their mistake at the specification stage. In fact I’ve quickly discovered that I myself a much better service if I blame my own company’s implementation, rather than client’s incomplete requirements.