For around fifteen years I worked on the other side of that veil of separation that is known in corporate environments as the IT service desk. On the employee side of the service desk you have the ordinary 'business users'. Here be folk who are simply trying to do their jobs: customer service agents, pricing analysts, underwriters, engineers. Their drivers are the usual human things; to get the job done with the minimum of fuss, achieve business goals in order to help with their career ambitions, or keep their jobs, or to go home with the sense of a job well done.
All of this activity above involves (or at least should involve) contributing to the overall business objectives of profit and growth. The customer service agents do this by helping retain customers and to please them such that they recommend the firm to others, pricing analysts help to keep the organisation focused on selling profitable products, underwriters make risk decisions favourable to the bottom line and engineers build the infrastructure that the company's services run upon.
These various workers use tools to help in their travails, and these are myriad. However in the information age they will largely be IT based. This, then brings us to the other side of the curtain; that shadowy authoritarian world behind the impenetrable boundary of the IT service desk.
