Why IT is not Customer Service ... and it should not be

After a number of years in consulting (the IT kind), I decided to try corporate IT in 2004. The immediate reason for my decision was the fact that I was going to school for a part time degree and did not want to miss classes due to travel. I had also become quite cyncial about consulting and the para dropping con-sultan-ts. I had started refering to me and my likes as con-sultan-t (sultan of con. the last t is silent).

In the last three plus years in corporate IT I have come to realize that corporate America deserves the con-sultan-ts. In my current role as the head of an IT organization in a startup I see the same behavior that I have seen in Fortune 500 companies (Sometimes I feel the list should be called Fortunate 500. Some of them are there in spite of themselves).

So, coming to the topic at hand. I have often heard executive in corporations including CIOs say IT is in customer service business. I say it is not. IT is in service business but to call it customer service is doing it a disservice. When you consider and treat IT as customer service you make IT act at the beck & call, whims of the rest of the organization. The customer is right/ keep customer happy attitude may win brownie points, it reduces the effectiveness of IT. The purpose of IT is total transformation of business (Ok, I borrowed that. The original went like this - "The purpose of religion is total transformation of man."). And, for it to do that IT must be ready to educate the rest of the organization on its work, question rest of the organization on their requirements, assumptions and challenge them to define financial metrics to measure success.