Viewpoint

One of the hit songs on Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubledanagement, says Alan Howard. Water album was called 'Keep the customer satisfied'. When the song was written in the 1960s, the concept of customer satisfaction was a relatively new one. Later, in the 1980s, a common business aim became to 'please' the customer. Throughout the 1990s the best companies have aimed to 'delight' the customer.

With the millennium rapidly approaching, it's time for the IT industry to decide what it wants to do for customers in the next century. But, first, we'd better make sure that we understand who those customers will be.

To date, IT has provided plenty of new opportunities for mismanagement of organisations. Far too many computer-based information systems prop up management and their outdated control structures, rather than supporting employees and customers. Vertical organisations and information systems dominate in most companies.

A key issue for organisations over the past decade has been IT benefits - or a perceived lack of them. Companies have spent billions on IT systems and have often been less than impressed with the results.

The main reason for this is that much of that money has been spent on systems whose primary function is to serve management, not the staff.

Whenever organisations have invested in IT systems which serve their customers and employees first, they have always had a positive return on investment.

The effect of IT systems on customer service should be the first consideration in any IT proposal. Secondly, systems must be designed to support the front-line workers who serve the customers. Management should come third in any proposal - not top of the list.

What companies have to come to terms with is that it is workers, not managers, who most directly affect the quality of customer service. It is workers, not management, who have the greatest insight into what works at the customer interface. It is workers, not management, who ultimately implement improvements in working practices.

It follows from this that IT systems supporting workers do more for businesses than systems supporting management pyramids. The management guru, Peter Drucker, once wrote: 'So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work'.

It's important that IT systems support and don't unnecessarily constrain workers with embedded bureaucratic controls.

In recent years, a few IT products have been marketed that support the relationship between workers and customers. Managers must provide workers with these systems and ensure they are trained and empowered to use them properly. The IT industry needs to focus on the development of a new generation of such systems.

If we are successful at this, then in the next decade we can really 'wow' the customers and ensure business success.

Alan Howard is a lecturer in information systems at Leeds Metropolitan University.