How may we not help you

I’m generally pretty strict with my consultants. I tell them NOT to regale the customer with stories about all the nonsense we find when dealing with hardware and software suppliers. Our clients hire us to make problems go away and shouldn’t care about our troubles. Still, the occasional story can be important if only to remind business people that bad service is not only aggravating, but expensive.

Here’s what happened. We’re in the process of ordering some new hardware at one of my clients. As the company has grown, we’ve decided that we should have one set of hardware for daily work and another for testing and recovery in case of disaster. So, Stacey, the unix administrator who does an awesome job for me goes ahead and orders the new stuff from IBM. She specifies exactly what we need and we wait for arrival.

When it finally comes, she discovers that IBM didn’t fill the order correctly. Now, when I order something from Land’s End, I expect that they’ll send me a new sweater if they shipped the wrong size. Indeed, they’ll even take it back if it was the size I ordered but it doesn’t fit. Nothing so simple in technology.

Rather than replacing the part directly, IBM tells us how to fix their problem. It’s as if Lands End sent us a needle, thread, scissors and dye with “easy to follow instructions” to fix the problem of a bad sweater. This goes on for days, wasting Stacey’s time until it eventually gets fixed. Of course, neither Stacey nor I are surprised that this happened or how long it took to get the fix. Think about the expense involved. Stacey probably wasted 1-2 days on this. In New York, the total cost of an in house IT resource is about $75 per hour. So, for a $20,000 server, the client has spent and additional $600-$1200 in time. Ouch.

Of course, the sad part is that IBM used to be one of those vendors where you paid a premium price and received premium service. Now, they just seem to expect the premium price.

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