You are right it can be difficult to excite the end users about those essential “plumbing” features, so a key part of deciding what is important in the project is recognising the whole voice of the customer. For a bespoke or tailored system then the purchaser will have several voices – the end users, the business funders and the “informed purchaser” (typically the customer’s IT management) – certainly as such an “informed purchaser” (I use the phrase slightly ironically!) I try to balance all of those factors into the brief I give to suppliers. I guess that with COTS applications the equivalent would be the vendor’s product management team who are trying to create a longer lifecycle for the product.

In both cases it’s a matter of extending people’s time horizons to look beyond the here/now (e.g. bells and whistles) to think about what they might want to do in the future, or painting scenarios of differing levels of availability to help them understand the importance of the plumbing…