Some horror tales of hiring the wrong high-tech consultant, and how to avoid this dangerous situation.
In the Wild West of high-tech consulting, the programmers and resellers who furnish products and know-how might be geniuses--or they might be snake-oil salesmen (who mow lawns on the side). And you're about to put your company in their hands?
Chances are, you've heard an information-systems horror story or two. They're not in short supply. A computer installation goes badly or some software is a nightmare, and a hapless company is thrown into chaos. Office automation is seldom a matter of writing a check (a big check, even) and turning on a perfect system. And if you think bad things happen only to computer illiterates, think again.
Consider the experience of a technical-services business in the Southwest that embarked on a major system upgrade. For legal reasons, the company must remain anonymous. Let's call it the Phalanx Corp. In 1994, Phalanx had sales of about $15 million and some 100 employees, and as it grew more sophisticated its old computer system no longer sufficed.
The president, however, was an engineer, and given his expertise, he knew the kind of hardware and software required to carry Phalanx to the next level. He opted for a Unix-based system running on a database and language called Progress. For the operating platform, he purchased an IBM RS/6000 minicomputer. That left one critical piece missing: programming code that could merge the company's three lines of business into a single operation for accounting and various reports. With no canned solutions on the market, the code had to be custom-written, a common situation.
Phalanx selected a small Florida-based firm for the job, budgeted at about $150,000. It appeared to be a sound decision. The Floridians were already working on a nearly identical program for a big plumbing-supplies business in Denver. When the president and the CEO of Phalanx visited that site in the course of their due diligence, the work was incomplete, but it certainly appeared feasible. With business cards, letterhead stationery, and a listing in Progress Software's directory of vendors, the Florida company seemed legitimate, and it kicked quickly into gear. Three programmers literally moved into the Phalanx facility and took rooms in a local hotel. With high hopes, the customer gave them keys to the office and a company car, expecting the work to take maybe six months.
A year later, in 1995, the programmers were still there, and the project was in shambles. "They never even got close," recalls Phalanx's CEO, "never even had a prototype."
Alarmed, the folks at Phalanx brought in a specialist in the Progress language, a Harvard-trained consultant named Arthur Fink, to confirm their sense that the program was a disaster; they knew it was, in business terms. "We asked him if it was worth salvaging," the CEO says, "and he decided it wasn't. It was garbage. We actually pulled the whole thing out and threw it away and started over from scratch with another contractor. It was a total waste."
The incident wasn't Arthur Fink's first exposure to a computer debacle, but he found it especially striking. "How could this very bright engineer get taken so badly?" he wonders. "He's the kind of fellow who would be my model client--crisp and clear and system-oriented. The company itself is technically very savvy. But he brought in these guys who wrote a program that was late and sloppy, lacked adequate features, and was pieced together from a number of different packages that worked in radically different ways.
"What they found out," Fink adds, "was that they were dealing not with a reputable vendor but with a bunch of kids who ran a lawn-mowing business when they weren't able to foist their software on people."
The annals of office automation are littered with examples like that, for good reason. It's a buyer-beware business, big-time--the Wild West of high tech. The consultants, programmers, and resellers who furnish products and know-how--including the countless independent operators who focus on small and midsize companies--might be superb, or they might be bozos. It's hard to tell. There are no formal accreditation procedures in the industry--no examinations to take, no licenses to be obtained. Technology moves too fast for that.
Consequently, it's all but impossible to screen out incompetent "consultants," who merrily leave behind a trail of botched jobs, busted budgets, and unhappy company owners. "About half my work is cleaning up messes somebody else created," says consultant Gordon MacDonald of Shawnee, Kans. "That's held true for 20 years. These other folks aren't necessarily malicious or evil. They're just nave about what they can deliver."
Even so, it wouldn't be fair to blame every fiasco on inept consultants. Customers can be almost as guilty. According to technology lawyer Frederic Wilf of Berwyn, Pa., many horror stories involve companies trying to automate on the cheap or ones that fail to thoroughly plan the project or that poorly articulate their goals. Consultants aren't miracle workers. They probably know zero about your business, and unless you go the extra mile in detailing your system requirements, problems are all but inevitable, despite even the best of intentions. It's like that famous line from Cool Hand Luke, Wilf says: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."
A small entrepreneurial company, for example, happens to know someone--"Joe"--who is in the computer field. "They ask Joe to do some work for them," Wilf explains. "Joe might not be qualified, but he tries his best and he gives a discount because, after all, these guys are friends. Usually, they don't bother with a written agreement or even talk much, frankly, about what needs to be done. It turns out to be a disaster for all concerned, and they end up in court yelling at each other. I see this all the time."
In scenarios like this, the problems can often be traced back to something called the "guru effect." When a company goes to buy a copy machine or a health plan, managers might perform all manner of analysis, but given the prevailing ignorance about high tech, they hardly know what questions to ask about computer systems. There's an adage in the computer consulting business: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. When a consultant walks in the door, he enjoys a hushed aura of awe and respect--the holy man is here.
