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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Painful USA Today article (was RE: ANN: REST Tut
 Probably because the reasons are diverse. One school of thought says hire Generic Consultant Company to write the specification because they've done lots of these. They don't realize that GCC may not be doing much analysis; they boilerplate. I keep seeing RFPs from them with the requirement to support "XTML", "XML" and "HTML". We see RFPs that require NIBRS support but are for agencies in UCR states. NIBRS is the future but the customer can't use it yet. We are asked to interface to legacy systems that duplicate effort and data to incredible extents. So we iron this stuff out in contract negotiations and in the response language. It is our business to know our technology and their business. If we get a customer that relies more on a generic consulting firm than on the RFP process, it is fairly difficult to keep from selling them more than they need. In other words, losing while being circumspect is still losing. We will walk away from that kind of business because we know that given unrealistic requirements, they will be back again. It happens more than some would believe. There is no substitute for having local skilled analysts when it comes time to buy, build, fight or flee. The context is fusion. What is needed, what is available, what works now, what might be working when needed, what is needed next Zed. Faced with that exercise, too many executives turn to a marketing guru or a consultant but fail to get in touch with the worker bees. Even if they do, they may not have the savvy to sort out the signals but do have the responsibility to decide when to jump into the water. Oh... then there is the budgeting exercise that hopefully results in funding before the next election. :-) len From: Betty Harvey [mailto:harvey@e...] I think the article is fairly accurate about what has been happening. Anyone in the trenches has seen some of these disasters. We have all seen major companies lock into software that goes out of business before the software is even implemented. I think the article could have even delved deeper into the problem. One quote I thought could correlate directly with what we are seeing with XML specifications and technologies: 'But companies don't always need what they get. "They overbuy and get more features, more functions than they need," says analyst David Smith of Gartner' 
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