>>I even had some customers where I knew more of their history than their current staff did.
>
>It's rare when we don't know more about what goes on at a client than most of the staff.
>You can thank Henry Ford and his division of labor idea. It works well, but we often find people at a client who don't know what someone at the next desk is doing.
>Systems people usually see a broader cross section of the business.

That's part of our job, to know how the customer functions. We need to understand it in order to build an app which will serve them. It's sometimes funny how much we have to learn, and gain some insight in their mode of operation beyond what their own workers have - yet on the other hand we often don't need the level of detail they do. One example is that for, say, a combo somewhere we need to know the possible cases, including those that happen once a year, yet we don't need to know when each applies.

We all had cases when we knew how to introduce something new in their process that they didn't see, which made their lives easier. Comes from our having to see the larger picture and from the level of abstraction we gain from doing it in different places.