Saturday, January 14, 2006

When Technology Evaluations Go Awry

Recently, I have been witness to a technology evaluation that has been a real eye opener. What you would like to believe is that individuals involved in an evaluation will have an open mind to all solutions, and that they would not try to hide the weaknesses and problems in one solution versus another.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that human nature has raised its ugly head in this. Although I would like to think that people will be honest, and have the best interests of everyone in mind, I have uncovered multiple instances where individuals have actually covered up things, and outright rated specific features that they did not even observe. All because they don't believe in an open standards and open source approach to technology. They believe that traditional commercial ISV solutions are inherently better, so they set out to "prove it", and in so doing they intentionally skewed test results, hid problems, or attempted to explain them away.

Now, what is the the result of all of this? The ultimate result will be that a company will pay more money for a solution that has no additional benefits over the open solution, has poor technical support, doesn't truly work as well as the evalution seems to state, and will take their entire organization backwards instead of forward!

This is the saddest thing I have ever witnessed in my career. That people would put their own "beliefs" and "pride" ahead of the best interests of the organization they are apart of.

I believe that what I just witnessed marks the beginning of the end of what used to be a successful organization. I can only hope that this kind of behavior is eventually rooted out.

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