The Customers of Information Services Management

Who are the customers of IT management? We need to understand who we deliver information systems for. Primarily we are providing IT for internal people; the IT customer is the employee of the organisation who then works on behalf of the organisation to serve the customers of the organisation. If our systems do not meet the needs of the internal customer, then they cannot service the company's customers. Hence we need to understand our customers; we need to know what they do, how they use the systems we provide. We need to understand their role in working with the IT department as co-producers of value. We also need to understand that the value of the system is obtained when IT staff are not interacting with the internal customer, but when the internal customer is using the information system as part of a constellation of activity directed at a particular role. In essence, we need to take a customer-dominated view of the systems and services we deliver to our customers.

Question: Using a case study, identify the customers of the information systems (IT) department. How can we find out what their needs are? How can we understand how they view the quality of the systems we provide? Explore and present some material on approaches to understanding and determining the quality of the systems and services we deliver to our customers. Introduce questionnaires such as SERVQUAL and tools such as customer journey mapping. Explain how we can involve our customers more in the management of information services.