In sum, user research provides an understanding of employees: it highlights what is important to them, what incentives motivate them, what their goals and work behaviors are, so that an IT organization can deploy OTS capabilities that better match user's needs. However, the benefits that contextual user research provides to a corporation go beyond the realm of IT. A typical qualitative research study identifies a wide range of potential areas for further study and/or highlights areas for improvement in business processes, services or tools, and organizational structure. User research often identifies overall organizational and cultural issues that might limit employee effectiveness or efficiency or affect user adoption and acceptance of new systems and processes. In essence, user research data helps a company understand the effectiveness of internal processes and practices to better identify improvement opportunities.

Companies may also find that their employees have needs that are similar to their customers. Because of this similarity, qualitative data gathered from employees can also directly contribute to product design decision making. For example, Intel IT has been involved in a pilot of several new phone technologies in an effort to increase job effectiveness through increased mobility. The pilots and eventual implementation of any new capabilities will also highlight the products that Intel sells. The user research data will thus have an impact on our overall understanding of people that use our mobility products, improving the technology that Intel sells to the consumer market.

Beyond benefits to the corporation, a more significant focus on delivering end-user value has major implications for the IT industry as a whole. Just as functionality alone is no longer adequate in driving product sales [10], simply providing technology to employees will not provide optimal return on IT expenditures. Ten years ago, many employees were provided with more powerful technology in the workplace (laptop computers, T1 lines, etc.) than could be easily accessed in their personal lives. As technology has become pervasive in all aspects of day-to-day life, more companies have incorporated UX principles into the development of consumer products. In many cases, the technology now available to consumers meets or exceeds the capabilities provided by IT departments, both in terms of functionality and UX. As people become more accustomed to products and services that deliver a good UX, the greater will be the desire for IT departments to do the same. Disheartening to employees is how they can search the entire Internet and find relevant results but that they cannot find customer information on the company Intranet.

A competitive advantage that IT organizations can deliver is greater business value through positive UX. Moving forward, it will be increasingly insufficient to simply deploy cheaper technology, focusing primarily on driving down TCO. IT organizations will maximize the business value they deliver by directly addressing and solving the issues their end users and business organization have in achieving their goals and objectives. Focusing on getting the optimal UX designed into the IT solution will help drive a greater overall return on investment than can be achieved by focusing primarily on TCO.

As companies realize that greater business value is a result of optimizing the UX delivered by IT, they will increasingly look to IT vendors that excel in this area. One of the underlying justifications for maintaining an internal IT organization is that it has a more in-depth understanding of and can provide solutions that meet employees' needs by working within a given corporate environment. Internal IT organizations that continue to focus primarily on TCO put themselves at risk for outsourcing as it becomes more difficult for them to demonstrate the value they add to the company compared to that offered by outside vendors. For vendors of IT services, delivering solutions that provide a superior UX will give them a competitive advantage over their peers. Internal IT departments that embrace the relationship between UX and business value position themselves to become a strategic partner within the company as opposed to simply being viewed as an additional expense.

In summary, all technology design and deployment efforts face constraints. Whether deploying an IT solution or marketing a new consumer product, project teams face the competing pressures of providing useful technology while balancing time, cost, and other limitations. Regardless of the context, however, the importance of delivering end-user value to ensure adoption (and sales) remains consistent. Delivering end-user value is best enabled by understanding end users through rich, contextual user research. From a UX standpoint, the OTS approach will at best lead to an approximation of the ideal solution. User research allows decision makers to find and deploy from available sources the standardized solution that most closely meets employees' needs.

To be most successful, decision makers need to understand the interplay and trade-offs between optimizing one area to the potential detriment of another. For example, on the one hand, customizing a solution to improve UX will add cost and can potentially impact other systems, increasing ongoing support costs. On the other hand, staunchly avoiding all customization at the expense of UX can increase training time, decrease productivity, and lead to poor user adoption. Adequately comprehending user considerations allows decision makers to identify the optimal balance with technical and business factors to ensure overall success.