Journal

…such as the customer experience of fixing broken IT systems.

The service industry evolved long ago, around the time when innovative services began targeting top-tier clients willing to pay premium prices—think airlines, banking, and hotels. In those sectors, delighting customers by delivering an outstanding experience was a legitimate strategy: it helped grow the market, improve loyalty, and outperform the competition.

In the 1990s, service logic started to be adopted inside organizations, particularly in IT management best practices. This is when the concept of the “internal customer” was introduced—without much critical thought. Was the purpose of the internal IT department really to deliver a great experience, sell more services, or increase loyalty?

Practices like customer satisfaction surveys, experience analysis, and NPS were adopted. XLAs and EX metrics were introduced, all based on the flawed assumption that pleasing the ‘customer’ is the primary goal of internal IT.

Consider two companies:

A/ IT follows best practices, measures CSAT after every interaction, and runs a well-staffed service desk that promptly resolves every ticket. They constantly strive to improve metrics like Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS), and their cost per incident is below the industry benchmark. Their volume of tickets is around 1 ticket per user per month.
They are proud of how good their IT support is.

B/ IT is focused primarily on creating frictionless IT. They work to eliminate technical debt and don’t measure CSAT, except for a brief annual survey on collaboration experience. Their MTRS is inconsistent because every outage triggers deep analysis and long-term fixes. They receive about 1 ticket per user every 3 months—three times fewer than Company A. Their resolution costs are higher than average.
From a support perspective, IT is mostly invisible. Their service desk is small, they allow multiple points of contact, and they know some minor issues never become tickets.

Which IT department is better? Which one contributes more to business outcomes?

This simplified scenario highlights the problem of positioning IT as a customer- and experience-centric function. In the 1990s, this mindset had merit—technology was often unreliable, and much of IT’s energy was spent fixing broken hardware or software. But today, we live in a different era: frictionless IT, automation, and the elimination of routine or algorithmic tasks are the true goals of IT.

Yet many consultants haven’t noticed this shift. They still operate within a world that no longer exists.

Metrics should move away from reactive processes (like service desks, incidents, and requests) and toward more meaningful indicators such as resilience, automation, and the absence of bad outcomes.

And please—stop calling your colleagues “customers.” They’re not, and never were.

As Ennius said: “The good is mostly in the absence of bad.”

Metrics that measure the ‘absence of bad’ are the right focus for modern IT management—such as overall IT quality, collaboration quality, innovation index, and productivity indicators.

The habit of collecting feedback after every interaction has become a widespread mispractice—driven by the uncritical adoption of customer-oriented management models beyond their original scope. Slogans like “The customer is king” or “We are here to serve you” reflect underlying mental models that are being applied in contexts fundamentally different from the transactional relationships for which they were designed. These practices assume a structure where metrics like Customer Experience (CX), NPS, and CSAT make sense—typically where transactional logic applies.

But within organizations, people collaborate with colleagues—not customers. They don’t reflect on their emotions and experiences after every single interaction: when responding to an email, speaking with IT, participating in a meeting, or working on a shared task.

On a typical workday, people engage in hundreds of interactions. Most of these generate no emotional reaction and thus no “experience” to evaluate. Asking people to reflect on something they barely noticed is a fast track to frustration and disengagement. It can even cause people to avoid interactions that trigger automatic feedback requests.

Problems Caused by Repetitive Feedback Collection:

• Repeated requests for feedback disrupt people from their daily work and consume mental energy that could be better spent on actual tasks.
• We ask them to reflect on situations (“How did you like…”) that often feel trivial or irrelevant.
• Annoying, repetitive surveys are a reliable way to undermine the value of your own work.
• Collaborative relationship is subtly transformed into an asymmetric one—where one party is cast in the role of a servant.

 

In reality, daily work often looks like this:

• Work gets done without disruptions, complaints, delays, or escalations

• Technology functions as expected

• Communication stays within normal, productive boundaries

We don’t notice these moments because nothing went wrong. No drama. No noise. No unnecessary friction.

In a healthy organization, the absence of experience isn’t a gap—it’s a sign of quality and maturity.

Think twice before asking people to rate their experience—especially when:

a) There is no clear customer–provider relationship based on transactional logic (e.g., purchase–delivery)
b) People engage in complex, interdependent collaborations
c) Feedback collection has become a goal in itself, rather than a part of a meaningful improvement process

In fact, when people increasingly ignore your surveys, it might be a good sign: things are running smoothly—and feedback collection can either be suspended or reframed as ‘Let us know if you experience something unusual.’

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Practical Hints:

• Avoid collecting customer-style feedback from people who are actually part of a collaborative effort, not customers

• Design systems that recognize exceptional situations—both negative and positive—and clearly define the boundaries for triggering deeper situational analysis

• Shift the goal from high ratings to staying within desired limits—a more realistic and sustainable measure of success

The key message of this article is simple: collaboration operates under a different logic than provider–customer relationships. Avoid mismatching methods and contexts.

No Experience (#NX) is a viable design goal: Seamless, low-effort interactions where cognitive load is minimized — so people can focus on what truly matters.

How to calculate metrics such as the No Experience Index (NXI) and Productivity Index (PI) is part of the IT Performance Reporting course, which provides a clear overview of a comprehensive set of qualitative metrics and measurement methods.

1. Colleagues Prefer to Be Treated as Customers
   Collaboration is often mistaken for a service relationship. Unlike transactions, collaboration is non-transactional and requires a fundamentally different approach.
2. Demand Is Endless
   The belief that working faster and more efficiently will meet endless demand overlooks what truly matters: delivering meaningful outcomes. Quality and relevance outweigh speed and volume.
3. Innovation Is the Customer’s Responsibility
   Assuming that innovation stems solely from customer requirements is flawed. Innovation is a team effort, driven by creativity, willingness to dismantle outdated solutions, and embracing the risk of failure.
4. Feedback Is a Reliable Control Loop
   The idea that stakeholders provide instant, accurate feedback for swift adaptation is unrealistic. Reliable, fast feedback is rare outside of routine tasks with predefined outputs.
5. Quantitative Metrics Matter Most
   Metrics like time, volume, and productivity dominate management practices, often sidelining critical aspects of knowledge work where outcomes and quality are paramount.
6. You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure
   Over-reliance on measurement leads to focusing on what’s easiest to quantify, often at the expense of qualitative, long-term priorities.
7. Work Is a Routine Input-Output Process
   Optimizing work as if it’s a mechanical process often prioritizes quantity over meaningfulness—e.g., generating outputs no one will use, such as redundant AI content.
8. Management Is About Command and Control
   KPIs often reflect outdated command-and-control mindsets. In reality, success depends on collaboration and innovation, making many KPIs misleading or counterproductive.
9. Knowledge Work Doesn’t Exist
   Traditional methods ignore activities like communication, analysis, and decision-making. These are resource-intensive and central to modern work but are often invisible in process-driven management.
10. Quality Means Meeting Requirements
    Traditional definitions, such as ISO 9000, equate quality with meeting customer requirements. However, a more modern approach views quality as a level of excellence—assessed not by compliance, but by evaluating the overall performance and capability of the system. This perspective is better suited for managing complexity.
11. Customer Experience Is the Core of Management
    This applies only to transactional relationships. Most workplace relationships are non-transactional, and treating colleagues as customers creates unnecessary divisions.
12. IT Should Act as a Service Provider
    Positioning IT as a subordinate service layer is outdated. Today, IT plays a strategic role, driving innovation and enabling new business models. Rather than functioning as a service department, IT is a core capability. Dismantling the service layer and SLAs can foster collective ownership, placing organizational capabilities at the center of joint efforts.

Transforming IT management begins with critically evaluating whether the assumptions of the past still hold true. In most cases, they do not. This is why IT management is overdue for a significant leap forward—one shaped by the realities of the knowledge era. The DCMM (Digital Capabilities Management Model)  aspires to be a key contributor to these innovation explorations, redefining how IT aligns with modern organizational needs.