Human Total Cost of Ownership: The Penny Foolish Principle at Work

Human-centered computing is about creating technologies that are intelligent in the usual sense of intelligent systems. But we also mean intelligent in the sense that they are usable versus user-hostile; useful because they´re designed on the basis of results from cognitive task analysis, so that they actually help people do things that need to be done; and understandable, in that the human can learn what the machine is doing and why. Allocating costs specifically to human-centering and cognitive systems engineering aspects of technology R&D will mitigate human-machine interaction issues and decrease training and maintenance costs, thus benefitting the service or system owner over the technology´s life time. If we follow HCC´s lead in defining the real costs of software systems, the procurement of technology and intelligent systems can become dollar wise