Dubbed 'Voice of the Customer Sessions', Peters shot 28 hours of video, edited it into 40-minute segments, and then posted them on the business school's intranet as streaming media clips for all to see.

By engaging the school's customers (its faculty and students) in the system design process, Peters says, "People felt like we really got it; we really understood what the challenges were and where we needed to take the course management system. And that helped generate enormous credibility."Peters' strategy of soliciting customer feedback in the design phase didn't end with the roll-out. Currently, Peters performs weekly health checks of the system -- the results of which are regularly communicated to faculty and students, along with notifications of system updates and modifications. There is also an advisory team that has constituents from around the community who are focused on the continued improvement of the environment.

For example, some faculty members post quizzes on the system. Answers are hidden until a pre-determined time and date, at which point they're automatically released for public viewing. An early, unintentional release of quiz answers, however, would be ruinous. So Peters performs regular checks to ensure that the system is configured properly, and to notify faculty members of upcoming content release dates.

"Probably one of the best things we do is the health checks," says Peters. "More than anything, it ensures quality." In fact, by keeping faculty and staff informed of the course management system's technical glitches, modifications and latest capabilities, Peters has greatly reduced the number of help desk incident reports from 70 during the week of September 17 to a mere 11 during the week of October 8.And, he says, the kids love it.

Unlike the User, the Customer is Always Right

Adirondack Medical Center's private practitioners didn't just ask for a new electronic health records system in early 2004, "they demanded it," according to Mike Kelly, CIO of the Rs 320-crore New York-based healthcare network. Composed of an acute care facility, two long-term care facilities and numerous outpatient facilities, AMC services 50 private practitioners who either care for patients or refer patients to the organization's services.

One of the primary goals of AMC's EHR system is to share patient information across New York's 26 regional healthcare facilities in a secure, HIPPA-compliant manner. Electronic patient medical records may include reports on past diagnoses, surgical procedures, imaging studies, allergies, drug histories and laboratory test results. By providing doctors with greater access to this information, AMC's goal is to ensure that physicians can provide patients with care appropriate to their conditions and that the delivery of this care is accurately recorded and preserved.

On this last issue, Kelly says that "Our physician community is justifiably concerned that in order to be paid for their services in the future, they're going to have to provide greater documentation that they actually delivered the services that they claimed to provide."

But while it was clearly time for AMC to graduate from its antiquated system of paper charts and place patients' medical records on their physicians' laptops and desktops, Kelly and his IT department knew the transition wouldn't be easy. Although AMC's physicians were "eager adopters of medical technology," Kelly was also aware that his customers -- those same physicians -- were a notoriously demanding group and jealous of their time and that it would be a hard sell convincing them that enduring stringent HIPAA-mandated online security measures would be worth their trouble.

"Our physicians viewed authentication, backup, permissions and access control as nuisances designed to aggravate them and slow them down," Kelly says.