| Risk of Obtaining IT Consulting Input |
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| February 2008 | |
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Some may believe a PC is a PC and a consultant is a consultant. How true is their belief? We provide a real life example below to illustrate a common risk that most businesses are exposed to when seeking input from IT consultants. The story happened in December 2007 when a medium size business in Albany decided to seek consultant input after experiencing a variety of information system operational problems. This company has over 30 staff, 3 servers and 25 PC and laptops and it is by no means small by New Zealand standard. It relies on information systems for communicating, accounting and transactional processing. The systems are maintained by a senior member of the staff who has reasonable knowledge of information systems. When problems started to happen, the senior member sought help from someone through referral. This external party was however unable to identify the cause of the problems after expending considerable effort. They decided to offer an upgrade of the server infrastructure and provided a quotation for such to the company. In the meantime, the senior member of the company was convinced that some sort of upgrade was necessary and had obtained a budget based on how much the company was happy to spend. When the quote arrived, a new problem emerged. The quote was 3 times of the budget! The company has been a Compucon user for 10 years, and so the company approached Compucon for a view if there is one. We responded that we did not have a view until we had reviewed the background through an on-site investigation which would be a chargeable exercise. The client was reluctant to accept the charge because the other consultant has spent 30 hours on-site already and wondered if Compucon can do better. At last, the investigation went ahead because of a certain level of faith in Compucon. It has proven to be a delightful exercise to the client as the Compucon consultant was able to pick up a few issues that were not told before. As an outcome of the investigation, Compucon produced a design report for the client including recommendations and options of actions. The report is a report and is not a quotation. Somehow, the company was very pleased with the approach taken and gave a purchase order to Compucon immediately to do the server upgrade job. The story does not end here. Compucon said not yet as the report is not a quotation and would need to produce a proposal with pricing for the client. The pricing turned out to be very close to the design review estimates. The job has since proceeded and completed. It has come under budget, ahead of time and caused almost no outage to the company during the overhaul. The job saved the company $50,000 of capital cost in one shot and more in terms of maintenance over time. The client is very pleased with the entire experience and has agreed to provide reference on this event to members of the public. What messages have you picked from the story above? |