Are your customers on drugs?

The Wall Street Journal's Business Technology Blog had an excellent post by Ben Worthen Tech Terms We Hate. The post discusses terms used in technology that are not descriptive and sometimes even insulting. The post states:

"What group of professionals other than those in information technology calls its customers 'users?' Off-hand, this blogger can only think of one: drug dealers. That's not to say the two are anything alike. But the word implies that the 'users' are utterly dependent on the provider. The Business Technology Blog also hates the term 'users' and we grit our teeth every time we use it (three times yesterday, once the day before)."

I started off in software engineering, so I used the term customers to refer to the people who bought and used the software products my company sold.

When I moved into IT, and later consulting, I cringed at the term "business users" because I always thought it belittled them and their role. It seemed to me that the term positioned the business people as subservient or at least beholding to the IT staff.

I tried using the term "customers" instead of users early in my consulting career, but IT people just didn't seem to embrace the term. I try to refer to business groups, such as finance, marketing, sales, etc., or to business roles, such as analysts, instead of using the generalized term business users.

This may seem trite, but names do matter and impact behavior. I find it humorous, for example, when IT people talk about forbidding business users (yes I know I just used the term) from using spreadsheets. Does the IT staff understand that the business people need to run the company and may need spreadsheets to get their work done? When did the IT staff start running the enterprise and start ordering the business groups around like children?

It wouldn't hurt if business users were customers and then maybe they'd be treated like customers.

Comments

[Vincent McBurney]

Even worse is "end user" which sounds like the programming for a demented killer robot. The problem is no one has come up with a better term that fits all situations. If a user of a shop is a shopper and someone who drives is a driver maybe we should be calling them Computerers.