Users are customers too-introducing quality improvement into IT

National Power PLC, the largest generator of electrical energy in the UK and one of the largest commercial electricity generators worldwide, by nature of its formation, is an excellent model of putting IT into practice. National Power started 1990 having to share a telecommunications infrastructure with its competitors. It also no longer owned a major IBM mainframe. As a result many of its central business applications had to be run on a competitor´s machine under a service agreement (and vice versa for other platforms). This was clearly unsatisfactory. The author discusses their IT strategy.<>