Kevin Costner has a lot to answer for. Playing the character Ray Kinsella in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, he was inspired to build his own baseball pitch after hearing voices telling him: “If you build it, they will come”. Inspirational as that may have been for someone looking to do a little more with their backyard than plant wisteria, as a management philosophy it has wreaked havoc ever since - not least in IT.

The “build it” line has since been applied to everything from railway lines to healthcare initiatives and, fittingly for a misquote (the real line is: “If you build it, he will come”), it tends to be bandied around rather carelessly. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of the web, where countless start-ups and a fair number of established companies have developed and released consumer-oriented products more in hope than certainty that they’ll attract customers.

It’s an even more dangerous philosophy in the business software field, as I was reminded during a conversation with an outsourcing company that had just struck a big HR deal with a well-known multinational. Manager and employee self-service is a significant component of the new agreement and is central to the customer’s plans both to cut HR admin costs and improve employee access to information. But, unusually, the way this deal is structured has less to do with optimistic projections about self-service adoption levels among employees and much more to do with sharing risk and reward.

Of course, the idea of providing employees and managers with online access to HR systems isn’t new, whether it’s to enable them to change their bank account details, view their pay history or carry out transactions such as submitting training requests. Today, self-service isn’t even restricted to the employee base: external job applicants can submit their details online and track the progress of their applications with candidate self-service.

It’s something every organisation should look at seriously, largely because the alternative approach – carrying on paying HR administrators to key endless data and answer a stream of mundane enquiries from employees – makes absolutely no commercial sense.

The problem is that there’s a difference between stuff making sense in principle and getting it to work in practice – a difference that usually comes down to factors such as ease of use, software navigability and how well you’re capable of managing a change project. The self-service software you buy needs to be designed for the way people really work, not the way some code-monkey at a software vendor thinks it ought to work.

In a conventional outsourcing deal, much of the benefit of self-service adoption (especially in terms of cost-reduction) goes to the outsourcer. But in the deal I was told about this week, the benefits are being shared much more evenly between the outsourcer and the customer. Put simply, the more employees use self-service and bypass the outsourcer’s relatively high-cost service centre, the less the customer pays.

Unlike most IT deals, this kind of set-up recognises one commercial reality: customers and suppliers have to make it happen together. Or, as Costner himself might have said: “If you focus on efficiency but build something that employees really want, there’s a fighting chance most of them might actually turn up.”