Vendor/BP application/service/product certification...some thoughts...

Folks,

Something that's bugged me for a while...

We're mostly old enough to remember the old Ford ads that said "the quality
goes in before the name goes on..."

Now, we both know that Rochester/Toronto/Austin, et al, are generating
quality product, but we also well know that the application is what the
people are buying.

Applications vary from system maintenance or other
tools/web/development/language utilities all the way up to the full blown
software packages that people use to run thier enterprises with.

IBM has made a major push in the past years to force certification of BP's
and the development community from a technical and marketing acumnet side.
But nothing has been done to certify that the applications these people are
selling actually do what the vendor says they will, that the vendor has
available technical support, that there's good documentation and relevance
to the products, etc...

In days gone past, and still to some extent, many business partners would
walk up to green uninitiates and expouse "Hi, I'm Joe Squid, I'm a Premier
IBM Business Partner..." And to the uninitiated, there was, easily, the
logical interpretation of implied faith and confidence, on the part of IBM,
in the people that they chose to do business with. Well...we all know that
the real picture was something else to a large extent... And I and others
can tell of horror stories of the days with AS/400 BP's sold expensive
vaporware and vapor services to people who were hoping to build thier
business on these promises...clearly, this did nothing to bolster the image
of the iSeries(or whatever name and time period) as people equate their
problems with the hardware and o/s, and not with the applications - it's
just how humanity thinks.

What I'd like to suggest is that IBM develop a certification process for the
Business Partner community to get thier applications certified as actually
working as stated, that they're supported as stated, that there's
documentation, that the things actually install, configure and work like
they're supposed to....Basically, IBM needs to be doing alot(and more) of
the stuff that I used to use as the basis of my Spotlight column in the
magazine. Clearly, there's a need to certify that the quality is there,
before the name goes on.

Now, I'll warn you, there will be vendors out there that have serious issues
with their product that will try to cajole, moan, and create all kinds of
smoke screens to divert attention from the real issues of not wanting to
make thier product work like it's supposed to...warn the testers that the
development community will find all kinds of reasons from: not liking how
you talked to them(so what does what was said in the email have to do with
if the product actually works or not?); not giving them a deferance because
they have invested so much money in R&D(so why doesn't the product work?);
and all the other lists of smoke screen diversionary attempt tactics that we
could talk about for a long time...trust me, in the last 10-12 years of
writing Spotlight, I've heard alot of them.

The NICE thing is, for MOST of the iSeries BP's, the review/certification
will be almost as proforma as ordering a corned beef on rye for lunch...and
that's how it should be.

But for a small percentage who have some serious issues with thier product
but chose to either avoid, smoke screen or attempt to side step cleaning up
thier act and quality, they will have an issue to have to deal with. And
frankly, we have to ask ourselves if we really want these kinds of vendors
and products and do they really add value to our overall product schema...I
think the answer has to be: clean up your product and act or take it off the
market until such time as it is delivered as marketed...

Clearly, product and service delivery certification is something who's time
is past due.

Don in DC