The lack of sharing of customer data in large software organizations: Challenges and implications

Paper in proceeding, 2016

With agile teams becoming increasingly multi-disciplinary and including all functions, the role of customer feedback is gaining momentum. Today, companies collect feedback directly from customers, as well as indirectly from their products. As a result, companies face a situation in which the amount of data from which they can learn about their customers is larger than ever before. In previous studies, the collection of data is often identified as challenging. However, and as illustrated in our research, the challenge is not the collection of data but rather how to share this data among people in order to make effective use of it. In this paper, and based on case study research in three large software-intensive companies, we (1) provide empirical evidence that 'lack of sharing' is the primary reason for insufficient use of customer and product data, and (2) develop a model in which we identify what data is collected, by whom data is collected and in what development phases it is used. In particular, the model depicts critical hand-overs where certain types of data get lost, as well as the implications associated with this. We conclude that companies benefit from a very limited part of the data they collect, and that lack of sharing of data drives inaccurate assumptions of what constitutes customer value.