The Purpose of IT and Who is your Customer
Tim Gagner pointed me to this blog post: The Purpose of IT and Who is your Customer. It's a short, interesting read. In the article, the author addresses the questions "Who are we and why are we here?" and "Who is your customer?"
It's worth a read, but I can sum up his post with two bullet points:
- IT exists to support the customer
- In a technical job, you customer may very well be another technical professional
This is definitely how we operate in OIT. We play a support role to the rest of the university. Due to the support nature of what we do, it's true that most of our customers are other IT staff at the university, often just within OIT. Ultimately, we are here to serve students, faculty and staff. But we do that by serving our direct customers - other IT professionals. Who are your direct customers?