the customer is king?

My final point (my loss of faith that “the customer is king”) is not just a change in my own thinking, but a sign of the maturing of IT in specific and of the business climate in general. In 1975, the typical commercial system we built was a first time automation of what had before been done manually. The customer, of course, was the only one who knew what this was all about and his/her sense of what the automated version would have to do was prime.

Today we are building third and fourth generation automated systems, and IT personnel are often as well or better informed about how the existing system works as their business partners. More important, the meaningful successes of IT today are no longer to be achieved by simple automation or re-automation of existing process. We have moved on to a new era: Our challenge today is to combine improved information technology and market opportunity in order to create product that is radically different from what could have been achieved in a less connected world. This tells us that the new king is neither client nor technologist, but their partnership: the tightly merged amalgam of business and technological expertise. Companies that achieve and maintain such a partnership are the ones who will prosper.

                                                                                                     Structured Analysis
                                                                                                            
                                                                                                            Tom DeMarco
                                                                                                            Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild
                                                                                                            New York

                                                                                                            at

                                                                                                            sd&m Conference 2001, Software Pioneers
                                                                                                            Eds.: M. Broy, E. Denert, Springer 2002