Saunders found the move from IT services to the customer side of the industry interesting. The main difference for him, he says, is that as an internal consultant he now has teeth and that people will listen. However, he admits he has been disappointed in what he has seen in terms of customer focus from his new side of the desk.

Terry Milholland, on the other hand, EDS' global chief information officer and chief technology officer, changed sides from the other direction. Before joining the IT outsourcing and services giant in September 1999, Milholland spent 21 years with Boeing, where he was appointed CIO in early 1997.

According to Milholland, EDS' philosophy is to use what it sells and sell what it uses, and to this end EDS is a client of itself in terms of its internal IT. However, he concedes that service level agreements are not as formal as for external clients, especially when it comes to penalty clauses.

However, before Milholland's arrival, EDS had its own organisation responsible for its internal IT. Milholland still has an internal IT department of some 150 people, whom he says focus on systems and strategy, but he purchases desktop support, computational support for applications and some applications development and maintenance from EDS itself.

"I'm pragmatic as to what we outsource, and in that respect we're a typical EDS customer. My philosophy is to source from EDS, stay leading edge and be a reference account, but it depends on where the skills are. [Likewise], I don't want to build up staff to compete with the rest of the company. I also expect decent service and to be treated as a client," Milholland says.

Boeing is very demanding of what its IT community provides, Milholland says, and in that respect he faces the same problems and challenges at EDS. However, the 12,000-plus IT people that Boeing has makes it a large shop by customer standards but one that is still dwarfed by EDS' 120,000 IT professionals. Milholland says it took him a while to fully appreciate the difference. In addition, he says that the end result at Boeing was a product, at EDS it's a set of services.

"I thought I would be at Boeing for life, but EDS felt like the right place to be. It's an opportunity for me to change the way EDS operates internally and help it grow. The environment in which people are working is conducive to their careers; they're not trapped and we can offer them interesting opportunities within the company," Milholland says.