The days when IT could tell end users what kinds of computing gear to purchase and use ended sometime in the 1990s, but for many years afterwards IT retained a stranglehold on the deployment and maintenance of enterprise infrastructure, corporate-wide applications, and building data centers. Those days are quickly becoming another memory for IT departments, who have seen the evolution of customer-facing applications and the Web- and cloud-based worlds that have arisen. These apps are changing the way that IT delivers its services, builds its enterprise architectures and selects its systems.

In a paper that I wrote for GigaOM,, I suggest ways to evaluate technology decisions from the perspective of customer experience and suggest metrics that can help businesses justify and benchmark the success of their future IT investments.