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

Abstract

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