Ellen Beldner

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Proto.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Summary: Let advanced users hack on your products. They will come up with innovations that you didn't think of.

This stands up nicely to an economic interpretation too: If someone is willing to take the time to hack around and build something that wasn't part of the spec, that means that they're willing to spend capital to have that functionality. Which means it's some sort of market opportunity.

Enterprise software can often be maddening like this: companies sell their software for $200k + and they want to be gatekeepers and prevent customers from getting into the code -- they want to preserve the mystique or something. But often they just end up being roadblocks to customer happiness. Like, I bet if we could have hacked on Oracle Calendar rather than having to build our own totally separate version, we'd be vastly more advanced than either system ends up being. Good, complex software takes time (a lot of time) and figuring out how to build on the accumulated knowledge of others (represented in code)

Unfortunately, the article puts this technique in opposition to "traditional" anthropological design processes -- which often aren't well-integrated anyway. There's absolutely no reason why you can't derive benefit from both techniques.