How Can We Make Our Customers Trust Our Systems?

Abstract

As the situations change very often and extensively today, the role of a user becomes increasingly important because it is he or she who really can understand the current situation and make decisions to cope with it. A user cannot operate machines or systems adequately if they cannot trust it. But formerly, machines and systems are very simple so that a user can expect how it would behave. But increasing complexity and diversification makes it more and more difficult. Software introduced the idea of continual prototyping and by evolving its functions step by step to a higher level after a user gets accustomed to it and build up trust in it. This paper points out that if we recall that most of the systems today are the combination of hardware and software, we might as well introduce the concept of continual prototyping into hardware- dominant systems. This would serve for a customer to build up trust more easily so that it is expected he or she can make decisions better and respond quicker and better. As hardware is physical, it has life. But software is non-physical so that it is eternal. If we consider that decommissioning of software is becoming a very big problem, we may utilize the phenomenon of deterioration as an indicator of the remaining life. Thus, if we put advantages of software and hardware together, we may come up with a system which will cancel the disadvantages each other so that it will increase user's confidence.