Recent news
reports indicate that a major American school district may be considering
bringing suit against certain of its hardware and software vendors. The district reportedly feels that the
product bundle they acquired from these vendors is unreliable, lacks
educational content and is difficult for non-native English speaking students
to use. The names of the parties are
irrelevant to this analysis, as it will not address the details of that
dispute. Rather, it will examine
procedures and safe guards to avoid such situations.
Reliability
In general,
computer errors arise from faulty hardware, faulty software, or incompatibility
between the hardware and software. Identifying such faults can be time
consuming and expensive. Perhaps the
hardware is defective; perhaps the software contains an unacceptable number of
flaws. Perhaps the hardware and software are sound, but the customer has
attempted an incompatible combination (e.g. running Mac software on a PC). For
the customer, minimum protections would include warranties of hardware and
software for 90 to 120 days of productive use.
Glaring defects should manifest within that time, and can be addressed
by the appropriate party. In the case of
a custom or bundled product, better protection would be contract with one
provider and require them to subcontract the other. The contract should also provide that, if
anything goes wrong, corrections are the responsibility of the prime. That will protect customer from being drawn
into disputes over whether the hardware or the software is defective. Better protection would provide customer an
opportunity to test the product before productive use begins. Thorough “acceptance testing” can prevent
unpleasant surprises after the live launch.
Content
A consumer
who purchases an off the shelf program and discover it does not meet her needs
generally has the option of returning or exchanging it. “Returns” are not quite so simple in the
commercial setting, where the contract may limit vendor’s obligations to fixing
malfunctions, and specifically disclaim responsibility for “fitness for a
particular purpose.” Unless the purchase
was made at the recommendation of vendor, customer may have to bear any losses
from poor product selection. Customer’s
exposure increases in cases of custom product development. In those circumstances, vendor bears the
burden of meeting customer’s specifications.
If the specifications are flawed or incomplete, the vendor will have a
good defense: it built what the customer
requested. Customers cannot
realistically ask for more, unless the vendor was also hired to also provide
expert analysis of, and solutions for, the problem in question.
Sound
protections for the customer would include detailed, measurable, specifications
and, once again, an opportunity to test the product before accepting it.
Ease of Use
This
analysis is quite similar to that used for Content: Did customer shop for a product that met its
needs? Did vendor build to customer specifications,
only to have customer discover that its specifications were inadequate?
Lessons
Learned
This short
study illustrates two keys of a successful IT contract. Customer must know what she wants, in detail,
and be able to set those requirements out in terms that are exact and subject
to measurable standards. Customer must
also require adequate acceptance testing, to uncover any flaws in design or
execution before the product is released for productive use.
