It seems to me that in most organisation, the equivalence to 'rental desk' is facing the customer, not having to write some code. So we should be taking developers/architects/etc. and bringing them to interact with end users.
Unfortunately it's not always possible. I worked on OSS [0] for telecoms. Consumers of OSS are dozens of different teams across telecom. No telecom company will externalize those end users to vendors. The best you can get is meeting with with "enterprise architects" who collected requirements from all the teams and wrote RFI to which, if you answered good enough, you will be granted in person meeting to explain them better how your stuff is working.
