{"id":7828,"date":"2025-05-13T12:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T10:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/?p=7828"},"modified":"2026-01-21T09:39:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T08:39:00","slug":"continually-improving-the-wrong-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/continually-improving-the-wrong-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"Continually Improving the Wrong Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\u2026such as the customer experience of fixing broken IT systems.<\/p>\n

The service industry evolved long ago, around the time when innovative services began targeting top-tier clients willing to pay premium prices\u2014think 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.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, service logic started to be adopted inside organizations, particularly in IT management best practices. This is when the concept of the \u201cinternal customer\u201d was introduced\u2014without much critical thought. Was the purpose of the internal IT department really to deliver a great experience, sell more services, or increase loyalty?<\/p>\n

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 \u2018customer\u2019 is the primary goal of internal IT.<\/p>\n

Consider two companies:<\/p>\n

A\/<\/strong> IT follows best practices, measures CSAT\/USAT 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.<\/p>\n

B\/<\/strong> IT is focused primarily on creating frictionless IT. They work to eliminate technical debt and don\u2019t 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\u2014three 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.<\/p>\n

Which IT department is better? Which one contributes more to business outcomes?<\/p>\n

This simplified scenario highlights the problem of positioning IT as a customer- and experience-centric function. In the 1990s, this mindset had merit\u2014technology was often unreliable, and much of IT\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Yet many consultants haven\u2019t noticed this shift. They still operate within a world that no longer exists.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> of bad outcomes.<\/p>\n

And please\u2014stop calling your colleagues \u201ccustomers.\u201d They\u2019re not, and never were.<\/p>\n

As Ennius said: \u201cThe good is mostly in the absence of bad.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Metrics that measure the ‘absence of bad’ are the right focus for modern IT management\u2014such as overall IT quality, collaboration quality, innovation index, and productivity indicators.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026such 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\u2014think airlines, banking, and hotels. In those sectors, delighting customers by delivering an outstanding experience was a legitimate strategy: it helped grow the market, improve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7831,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7828"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8277,"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828\/revisions\/8277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.q4it.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}