Cautionary Aphorisms for Customer-Oriented System Development
Drew Stevens · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 1994
Of the three substantive two-word clusters in the title of this note the least important is system development. Although people who attend conferences like this may be interested in system development, few other people are. Customers, in particular, are much more interested in system use, system availability, and system effectiveness, than in system development. Because it is the customers who keep one in business, it therefore behooves one to develop some techniques to keep use, availability, and effectiveness in mind--in other words, to develop a customer orientation. This note illustrates one such technique: the distillation of applicable wisdom concerning people, systems, and the relationships between them into statements made memorable by their wit, brevity, and pungency. In this session the author hopes to start one on the way to one`s own collection of useful thoughts. It should be noted that the preparation of such a collection serves as a working demonstration of the value of re-use as a productivity principle: few of these statements are original with him, and many had origins in other applications. He considers in turn methodology and procedure, design, schedules, measurement, documentation, and quality.