Assessing a Data Administrative Program - High-Performance Web Databases: Design, Development, and Deployment - page 682

THE DATA ADMINISTRATION CUSTOMER
This brings up the question, who are the recipients of data administra-
tion services? What they want? Do data administration departments listen
to their customers and understand what they need? A program assessment
will help document a baseline of customer opinions of the services they
receive that can be used to identify potential changes to the data adminis-
tration program.
Organizations have applied Total Quality Management principles to their
business functions and have determined what their value chains are in part
to get each employee to understand how what they do affects the customer.
Some municipal motor vehicle offices have instituted customer service rep-
resentatives that are trained to take a customer's problem, issue, or request
and complete all the steps necessary to resolve it; the customer is not sent
from window to window or from department to department.
Who is the data administration customer? Is there one customer or more
than one customer? Is the data administration customer the immediate,
next-in-line customer (e.g., a database administrator or systems project
manager)? Is it the end-of-the-line customer (e.g., the information
requestor or systems users)? Is it the end of the end-of-the-line customer of
the information system (e.g., a consumer of employee)? Where is the data
administration program money coming from? Is that the customer? Should
it be the customer? If it is not the next-in-line or end-of-the-line customer,
should the money come from one of them instead?
The interconnection of customers is complex, and most data adminis-
tration departments will find that they have several different kinds of cus-
tomers. There are advantages and disadvantages for specifying any combi-
nation of these as the primary customer. For purposes of conducting a data
administration program assessment, it would be better to keep the number
of types of customers small, but significant. The groups included should
have awareness of the data administration program well before the assess-
ment is going to be conducted. they should have been participating in
some data administration-sponsored activities for some time. They should
be positioned within the organization in such a way that their opinions will
carry weight with the main audience for the assessment results.
While identifying the customers, data administrators should ask them-
selves are we listening to our customers? These are some examples of cus-
tomer complaints that the data administration organization may hear:
• My system does not work!
• Someone changed MY data!
• These reports are wrong!
• How can I figure out how many employees are eligible for this?
• Why does it take so long to make changes to the system?