Admission up front - this (brief) piece is a straight up rip-off homage to a post by Pete Warden titled 'Things users don't care about'. You should click over and check out Pete's list, from a technology service provider perspective, of things that a solution's users don't care about. In case you don't click over to the post, here are just a few of these nuggets of insight on things users don't care about:
How long you spent on it.
How hard it was to implement.
How amazing the next version will be.
What you think they should be interested in.
Whose fault the problems are.
Fantastic stuff. And if you look across these examples, and several of the others Pete provides, it is pretty easy to discern the common themes. Namely, that users, customers, or employees from an HR service provider perspective, generally don't care about your problems. In IT it might be buggy
Don't care. software, a difficult to manage supplier, or a lack of budget to procure new hardware or software. In sales it could be an inflexible pricing structure or an inability to promise a delivery. And of course there are a million 'HR' problems that, mostly, your employees simply don't care about.
Government immigration rules making it hard to get visas for the three foreign engineers?
Don't care.
Recruiting system doesn't talk to the Payroll system making your team do double entry of data?
Don't care.
The list of 'mandatory' job requirements for the open position I'm trying to fill is so long, it's making it impossible for you to deliver a deep slate of candidates?
Don't care.
(I admit at least on that last one, your hiring manager should care, but that doesn't mean she does.)
Sure, in a perfect world and in an high-functioning, collaborative, 'Best Places to Work' kind of environment your problems as an internal service provider would actually resonate with your customers and employees. But most of us don't work in places like that.
Even in really great organizations, IT or Legal or Auditing or HR are still often simply looked at as the necessary evils of doing business. The 'users' or customers might, and often probably do care about the needed outcomes you deliver, but not one bit about the myriad of struggles, travails, and long hours you have to spend to deliver those outcomes.
It's the outcomes that matter, not what had to be overcome along the way. Within reason of course. Don't decide to go all Lance Armstrong on us.
But truly, it's a Honey Badger world when you are overhead. And Honey Badger, as we all know, simply don't care. (link to the video you have seen a thousand times, but it remains NSFW).