International Business Machines Corporation. Big Blue. Revenue of almost $107 Billion in 2011. Infinite resources? Well, not quite. Occassionally we get a problem where we need a little more help. That's ok. We've got extra help. Our customers.
I'm not sure which is the better analogy, the twelth man from football or the sixth man from basketball. For the non-sports fans, the former refers to the impact of the home crowd and the latter refers to the first player off the bench. In either case, both can be the difference between a win and a loss. Our customers are like that, and I'm not talking about the fact that they give us money. (I really appreciate that fact, but it's not where I want to focus.)
I wrote earlier that learning how customers use our systems makes me a better software engineer. But there are other ways that customers help. Two of the big ones are: determining best practices and problem determination.
While we at IBM attempt to provide solutions with clearly articulated best practices, we occassionally fall short, and some of that comes from the increased complexity of end-to-end solutions. I'd like to know what the average number of different vendors is for a given solution, or the number of possible combinations of vendor pieces in the stack. It's difficult for any one vendor to evaluate all those possibilities, or even a couple vendors in partnership. Enter the customer. When you share your experiences with us, we're better able to see what works best.
In fact, often when I provide the IBM best practices, I'll get the questions, "So how many customers are running that way? Can we talk to one of them?" It's part of the reason why we're so persistent about asking people to be references. By taking the experiences, good and bad, from various customers, I've been able to help guide new customers better. By knowing these customers well, I also know their skill levels, organization structure, and to some degree IT investment strategy. When talking to a customer, I sometimes feel their patience start to slip away as I'm asking various questions about their environment or the politics in their shop. I know they just want me to answer the question du jour of "What's the best practice for fill in the blank?". Well, what I'm doing is trying to match the profile of the customer asking the question with profiles of other customers.
I've also called on customers to help with problem determination. Have you ever felt a bump on one side of your head and immediately check the other side to see if it's normal? It can be effective. I do it with systems too, compare good with bad data. However, there are times when a customer has a problem and I don't have a "good" system like that. Or they are running vendor software where I have no experience. No problem. I'll think of two or three customers running that and ask them for some data, or ask if they have seen symptoms. There have also been times where I don't know of a customer running that way, but will post to IBMVM listserv and ask for a sample of data for a given environment. I've never been disappointed with help provided.
There is a tradition on many sports teams of retiring the jersey number for an exceptional player as a way to honor them. The Seattle Seahawks did it right. They retired number 12 to honor their fans, the crowd, the twelfth man.
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