August 5, 1996 Your job is to help your company succeed, not to please internal customers MANAGEMENT SPEAK: All of our customers are satisfied. TRANSLATION: Everyone else has taken their business elsewhere. Thanks to reader Jon Bondy. True story. The scene: Northworst Airlines. Time: 10.5 minutes before flight time. Players: Yours truly and a gate agent. "You needed to be here earlier. We've reassigned your seat," the agent says. "But your brochure says if I'm here 10 minutes before flight time you guarantee a seat," I protest. "It's 10 minutes before flight time right now," the agent responds, pointing to his watch. "So how could you have reassigned my seat?" I ask. "I got here 3 minutes ago, waited in line, and still started talking to you before the deadline." "You needed to get here earlier," the agent says. When I die, I hope to thank the good Lord for making my life a continuous psychedelic experience. Until then, let's continue our discussion about real customers, internal customers, and the difference between the two. As you may recall, last week I proposed that "internal customer" is a metaphor that has gotten out of hand. It's useful for process design, because that discipline requires an understanding of the inputs and outputs of a system. As a guide to behavior, though, it's pretty questionable, as anyone who has been on the receiving end of "I'm your customer so you have to do what I ask you to," can verify. ("Yeah, buddy. I have 2,500 customers, and I have to obey each one of you plus my boss," is the usual, subvocal response.) I learned the right attitude about all of this one week after joining Perot Systems. (I generally avoid any mention of my employer in this column, but I must give credit where credit is due.) Jeff Smith, who takes care of our "World Area Network," and I were discussing how to link Minneapolis to the company WAN, and I proposed an alternative that Jeff found suboptimal. "Bob, I'm here to help you succeed," Jeff said before patiently reiterating his preference for using the same kind of frame relay link that everyone else uses. Bingo! If I were Jeff's customer, he'd have given me what I asked for. That's not his job. His job is to help me succeed, and that's an entirely different spool of cable. The traditional role of the information systems department has been to help the rest of the company succeed. That's a wonderful role to have. We get involved in everything the company does, always looking for ways to help it improve. That's a whole lot more satisfying than responding to orders from internal customers, don't you think? The process of resolving this issue leads to another useful insight. We humans have an instinctive urge to categorize, and that leads us to apply labels to everything we see. When we're categorizing the unfamiliar, we try to draw on similarities with the familiar. So physicists had a centuries-long debate over whether to categorize light as a wave or a particle, leading to the famous "wave/particle paradox." No paradox at all, explained Albert Einstein. Light is its own kind of stuff. It has some properties similar to those of water waves, others similar to those of pellets. The "paradox" just shows our own intellectual deficiency coming into play. Physicists understand light -- actually, all electromagnetic radiation -- by developing descriptions, in the form of mathematical equations, of its behavior. They use those descriptions to predict how electromagnetic radiation will behave in various circumstances. That, in turn, lets engineers design new and better optical devices, such as the new digital video discs, which many predict will supplant the still-pretty-clever CDs and CD-ROMs we use today. And that's our lesson for today, class: Worry less about attaching labels to classes of people and more about describing the behavior you do see and prescribing the behavior you want to see. Bob Lewis is a Minneapolis-based consultant for Perot Systems Corp. Send him e-mail at robert.lewis@ps.net. To respond to this column go to the forum. Missed a column? Go back for more. Copyright © 1996 by InfoWorld Publishing Company