theoretically could write or install a new program (the “What”) in an
effective way (the “How”), justify his actions (the “Why”), and ideally
do everything at a reasonable price (the “How much”) before the data
base grew too unwieldy (the “When”). Stewart wanted him working on his
own premises (the “Where”) as much as possible so he could supervise
him.
“Our first consultant lasted all of four days,” Stewart said. “He was
abrasive, nasty, and didn’t know what he was doing. One of our staffers
was so frustrated trying to work with him that she wept. We’d hired him
because he was a friend of a friend and said, ‘I’m a computer
programmer. I can fix it for you.’ We never quite could pin him down
about his background. We were so burned that for five or six months we
put off hiring another consultant.
“And when we did get one,” said Stewart, “we wanted a solid, established
firm.”
So he went to a government contractor headquartered in an imposing
building, the size of a small public library. The consultants even owned
the same-model computer that Stewart’s company did.
Unfortunately, however, they were using different software for much
different purposes. Stewart’s needs were new to them.
“Look at MDBS,” Hillard recalls telling the contractor. “It really looks
like a good package.”
But he says the consultants told him they hadn’t even heard of it.
That in itself might have been a tipoff that Stewart had hired the wrong
people for the job. MDBS stood for Micro Data Base Systems. Ads and
reviews about it had appeared in _Byte_ and other prominent publications
of the micro world.
With the clock ticking away at up to $35 an hour, the consultants
searched for data-base software meeting Stewart’s detailed
specifications. “Three weeks later,” Hillard said, “they handed me a
bill for $2,500 and said, ‘The package you need to use is MDBS.’ I said,
‘Where is the work, where are the hours in relationship to the $2,500
bill?’ It went around in circles.” Stewart and Hillard must have
remembered the old saying that a consultant borrows your watch to tell
you the time of day and then charges you for it.
According to Stewart, in fact, the consultants based most of the report
on material his company had given them.
By think-tank standards in his area, Stewart may have gotten a bargain.
Dealing with consultants new to micro data bases, however, he was in
effect paying their tuition.
“The federal government must like them immensely,” Stewart said,
“because they do good, documented work in the fields they have expertise
in. But a small businessman had no business using them. After two and
one-half months we had nothing but recommendations on the data base—and
a stack of bills”—$2,500 high.
But there was hope. Stewart’s corporate benefactors were sticking with
him. If he could get his data base running, he could easily recoup his
losses, offering clients a treasure trove of information about
government policy-making affecting them. Although Stewart thought of
himself as a truth seeker, his vice-president was bluntly a money man.
“We would have sold our service for a million a year,” Hillard said,
“and we would have netted $600,000. We were using four people to feed
the articles into the computer, but that would have changed, because
optical readers eventually could scan magazine articles and newsprint.”
So now Hillard shopped around for a new savior to unravel the
complexities of the MDBS software that he had settled on.
He found three possibilities. One consultant, a micro expert, was snowed
under with work, and another man had only mainframe experience. So
Hillard and Stewart chose Fred Brown, a retired military officer who had
worked not only on big computers but also little Radio Shacks and
TeleVideos. In fact, Brown came recommended by the manager of a local
computer store. The manager leveled with Stewart. He said he and Brown
were together in a partnership developing software for lawyers’ offices.
Hillard asked only two people about Brown. And both references came from
the computer-store manager with the business relationship with the
consultant. Inquiring about Brown, however, Hillard asked some good
questions. Did Brown document the software properly? Did he, in other
words, tell how to use or change it? Did his software work? Did he meet
deadlines? Did he live up to all the specifications in his contracts? “I
got affirmative answers to most of these questions,” Hillard said. One
reference said a software project of Brown’s hadn’t come in on time but
brushed off the problem as a hardware one.
Unfortunately, Hillard didn’t ask _all_ the right questions. Brown had
never before worked with the brand of computer that Stewart Research was
using; nor was he fully comfortable at the time with the exact kind of
software used at the company.
Brown, however, struck Hillard as “a very nice professional.” He wore
three-piece suits, lived in a $140,000 home with several computers in
the basement, and held a masters degree from an Ivy League school.
“No problem,” Brown told Hillard. “Listen, I charge——” He gave an hourly
figure to the nearest cent; $30.02, we’ll say.
“What?” asked Hillard. “Why 0._02_ an hour?”
“I like to be fair about my salary, and that gives me $30,000 a year.”
“Okay,” said Hillard, “that’s cute.”
Brown wasn’t about to apply for welfare. On top of the $30,000 for
consulting part of the time, he was enjoying income from sales of
computer hardware. In short, he came across as successful and honest.
And he may have been. Just the same, client and consultant were clearly
mismatched.
Their downfall was a familiar kind—software problems.
You could customize the MDBS program in FORTRAN or BASIC. The earlier
consultants, the ones with the large government contractor, had
suggested FORTRAN. Brown himself was more familiar with that than with
BASIC. And Stewart was convinced that FORTRAN would make the best use of
software already purchased. So Brown went ahead with it despite three
strikes against him:
1. The computer company’s FORTRAN, according to Stewart, was as badly
botched as its hardware.
2. FORTRAN wasn’t as good as BASIC for micro data bases that stashed
away English prose rather than mainly numbers. Another consultant was
amazed when I told him that Brown had used FORTRAN in a data base
storing newspaper stories. “You can use it if you like,” he said, “but
you’ll lose something. It’s like trying to translate Hemingway into
pidgin English.”
3. Brown was still basically a mainframer. And micro FORTRAN was
different from the kind used at large military installations. Writing
software for micros is like writing short stories instead of novels.
You’ve got to be more elegant and get to the point faster. A micro’s
memory simply lacks the capacity of a mainframe and brooks less
sloppiness than would a larger machine. Many great novelists could
never write decent short stories, and many first-class mainframers
just couldn’t code cleverly or deviously enough for micros—couldn’t
electronically trick them into thinking they were larger machines.
“What happened,” said Hillard, “is that we were paying for Brown’s
training on how to use FORTRAN on a micro. He spent forty or fifty hours
developing specifications for the data base and writing the code. This
went on and on. Brown kept running into all these problems, and he could
have cleared up some with just a quick call to the manufacturer.”
Meanwhile, the money clock was ticking.
Several months later, thousands of dollars richer from those
$30.02-hours, Brown threw up his hands. “This isn’t going to work in
FORTRAN at all,” he said. “Maybe we should do this in BASIC.”
“So,” Hillard told me, “all the work he’d done up to that point was out
the window.”
“And on top of that,” Stewart said, “we were anticipating our new
software package and didn’t care to feed the information twice into the
computer. So we built up a backlog of well over 10,000 articles waiting
for the software that never came.”
Brown’s clock ticked away for several thousand dollars more in time,
bringing the total billing to $8,630.81. Then it stopped. Stewart
Research had simply run out of money.
Stewart’s corporate sponsor could send no more. “Their pockets,” he
said, “just weren’t deep enough to subsidize both our own computer
literacy and that of our consultants.” When I talked to Stewart in
mid-1983, his computer was doing word processing and other minor chores.
“But,” he said, “it does hardly enough cross-referencing to be a major
data bank.” His research firm faced some $30,000 in debts, including
much of the $2,500 bill from the consultants with the library-sized
building; and he and his wife were the only two employees left in
Stewart R & D. He still hoped to get the data base going, however.
“We’re going to become computer consultants in self-defense,” said
Stewart. “I’ve done nothing but work on this computer for a year.” It
would be nice to be able to do the same, but most of us lack the time or
talent; the challenge is to find the right computer consultant so you
won’t end up feeling you must do the work on your own.
Not so coincidentally, Hillard himself actually did go on to become a
computer consultant part time. He wasn’t the smartest or the best
credentialed, but he had what many of the more established consultants
lacked—empathy and humility. Don’t shrug off those traits. The real
question, as one consultant pointed out to me, isn’t just whether
someone is competent; it’s whether he’s competent enough at the job he’s
doing for you. Never forget that when pondering the “Who?” and “What?”
Stewart and Hillard obviously aren’t the only people who didn’t ask the
right questions in time. A sail maker wasted $18,000 on a computer
system recommended by a consultant. The machine didn’t work right with
the hard-disk memory, and it lacked proper shielding against the
60-cycle hum given off by power lines. By the time Hillard was on the
scene, the consultant had left town. He says the computer was such a
disaster that “I suggested to the client that he get a length of rope
and use it as an anchor because it was unfixable.” In another case, a
truck-rental firm spent $30,000 for $15,000 of computer equipment. And
then the consultant didn’t even supply instructions to operate and
modify the software. “As far as I know,” said a more ethical expert,
“he’s still a consultant. Computers are mystical, and most people don’t
know when they’ve got a good system or when they’ve got a bad one.”
“The real problem,” Hillard correctly said of consultants, “is that the
microcomputer field has only been around since the mid-seventies and
things are moving so rapidly. It’s hard for anyone to keep up,
consultant or layman.”
There is, too, a nasty economic fact. A micro consultant can’t reach
full prosperity, in many instances, without having ties with stores or
manufacturers. Indeed, most micro consulting nowadays is done in effect
by sales reps recommending systems to their customers. How objective can
they be? Even conscientious consultants—independent or those with
ties—may still favor the computers and software with which they’re most
familiar. The man and the machine in effect become one package.
Another anticonsultant argument is that small computers may soon be
inexpensive and simple enough to make consultants much less necessary.
You don’t use a consultant to buy a $1,000 typewriter. And by the time
you read this, or a few years afterward, we’ll have good, complete word
processors selling for no more—with printers.
Yet another anticonsultant argument is that you may have computer-wise
friends in your own business or profession, smart people you trust. They
may actually anticipate some of your needs better than would a
consultant. Moreover, it’s been said that if you know enough to pick the
right consultant, then you really don’t need one.
I’m not sure. As one consultant pointed out, it’s like choosing doctors.
You can be good at choosing one without necessarily knowing brain
surgery.
I was a borderline case. I still might have bought a Kaypro without
Michael Canyes’s approval, since I knew another writer familiar with the
glories of the Osborne who appreciated the greater glories of the
Kaypro. On the other hand, with my consultant friend’s guidance, I could
shop for the lowest price rather than the most technical help from the
dealer. And Michael steered me away from the dot-matrix printer, which,
with their inferior print quality at the time, would have been bad news
for me. I was lucky. I had befriended Michael through an Osborne user
group at a time when he himself was looking for advice on writing, so he
didn’t even charge me. You may be similarly lucky if you have a skill a
computer consultant needs. But don’t count on it. So often, free
consultants are worth their charges.
Had I not been as fortunate and had I experienced difficulties, I would
have been willing to pay for advice. And mind you, my whole system costs
less than $3,000. “You don’t want to spend $10,000 on a computer
system,” Michael warns, “and find it doesn’t do what you want. You’d be
better off spending several hundred dollars or more to learn exactly
what you want and get some help installing it. Think of the business
you’ll lose if you install your computer and it doesn’t work as planned.
It depends. You could also spend a lot of time shopping and talking to
people and not pay a consultant. It depends what your time is worth. The
average guy has one or two uses for his computer in mind, and he doesn’t
want to piddle around with the complexities of the thing. He just wants
to cut right down to the core of it and get this job moving. If a
consultant spends two or three hours with someone discussing a micro, it
may cost perhaps $75 or $100. But the client might master in a day what
might normally take a week or even several.” The wrong consultant,
however, may actually cost you more—in money and time.
When shopping around for the right one, you’ll first want to consider a
_what_—what work you need him for. Forget about computers. Does the task
make sense commercially? Are you realistic about its costs? A former New
England consultant tells of a baseball enthusiast who wanted to recreate
some board games on the computer screen. It might have worked. But the
man didn’t just want a computerized arcade game here—rather, a
replication of ball parks, with their actual proportions. “He had a
statistical background,” recalled the ex-consultant, “and had done some
statistical consulting for a professional sports organization.” But
there was a problem. The man believed that the consultant could perform
this miracle on an Apple for less than $5,000. Actually, the program
would have cost $50,000 to write—probably more than the man could
quickly recoup through sales of the program. The consultant turned down
this mission impossible. But the client let his enthusiasm for the
project blot out his business sense and in fact squandered $55,000 on
another consultant, who, incidentally, botched the job.
Now move on to the details of the work you want done. Do as with
software; get as clear an idea as you can of the paperwork you’re
computerizing. You may want your electronic files organized entirely
differently from your paper ones. Whatever the case, plan ahead. You
don’t want to—as somebody once put it—automate your confusion. And
there’s another reason for knowing your precise needs before calling a
consultant. Trying to jack up the bill, some experts can be brilliant at
inventing new problems to fit their prepackaged solutions. Or they may
downplay your real needs because the answers are not in their tool kits.
You’ll also want to decide if the consultant is just to give advice or
more. Don’t pay simply for advice, then expect him to haggle with
equipment suppliers and install the software.
And what about other services besides advice? Take the task of keying
paper records into your computer system; some consulting firms will line
up temporaries for the job. That way your normal people must worry only
about their regular work and learning the new computerized routine. Of
course, this =data-entry= work may itself be part of the training, and
at least if your people enter the material, they’ll more easily find it
later on.
As you define the _what_, you also get into a _when_—your deadline for
computerization and how long the consultant or the firm is to remain on
the job. There is a happy medium. You want him around long enough, full
time or part time, to get the system up and running. But don’t count on
making him in effect an employee. Hire permanent people if that’s going
to happen. Joseph Auer, a $1,500-a-day computer-negotiations expert with
blue-chip clients like New York Life, tells what can happen when
consultants stay too long. A bank used a consulting firm for years. The
outsiders became the main people familiar with the electronic links
between the automatic teller machines and the big computer. Then the
bank woke up. It realized that the outsiders could cripple its
operation. The consultants didn’t blackmail the bank, but it was worried
enough not to risk incurring their displeasure. Rather than farming out
the work to a facilities management firm as planned, it extended the
existing consultants’ contract, with the understanding that the
outsiders would make the bank’s own people self-sufficient.
Next go on to the _who_ question. A generalist who’s a good, quick
learner might be a better deal for you than an overpriced guru who
limits himself to one area. It’s like medicine. I’d much rather be cut
up by a smart general surgeon with a steady hand than by a mediocre
cancer specialist. Of course, for a complex job, you want the equivalent
of a top cancer surgeon. At Stewart, anyway, the right specialist might
have “programmed” the company to succeed.
Intertwined with the _who_ are two _how muches_—the size of your company
and the task for which you need the consultant. Are you a small
businessman or a Fortune 500 executive? The consulting needs of the two
categories may overlap. The general rule, however, is that a large
company will feel more comfortable with a large consulting firm (GM,
say, with Arthur D. Little) and a small company will be better off with
a small one. A small businessman may enjoy more personal attention from
a small consultant. He knows the people he’s dealing with, and it’s
harder for the firm to pass the work on to a green employee—while
charging the full price. The smallness of the firm, of course, makes it
that much more important to check out references. Of course, sometimes
the small guy may fit the large company’s bill; Michael Canyes, for
instance, has tutored WordStar classes for the Federal Trade
Commission—a good buy for the taxpayers, considering his skill and low
overhead. “The smaller consulting firms,” he wisely says, “are likely to
save a large business money when the consultants are working within
their limitations.”
Canyes, however, at the time I wrote this chapter, wasn’t the consultant
to install a $5 million micro network. He might be one day, but back
then he just didn’t have the resources to do the job justice. A Big
Eight accounting firm would have been better than Michael; in fact, an
executive with a large company mightn’t need an outside consultant of
any kind—large or small. His or her employer may boast a large
microcomputer center and a helpful data-processing department. But you
never know. Sometimes, Data Processing is either ignorant of micros or
discourages their use. Ask some test questions. Has anyone in Data
Processing ever installed a micro for business purposes? Do many in the
department have micros at home? Are they reading the micro magazines and
newspapers—_InfoWorld_, say, rather than just magazines about the big
machines? If Data Processing isn’t comfortable with micros, you’d do
well turning to the outside.
One of the qualifications for the outsider, of course, might be his
ability to work harmoniously with Data Processing if you’re hoping to
hook into the mainframe. Then again, your micro might be a stand-alone,
not exchanging information with other computers, so that you needn’t
worry what Data Processing thinks. Even if you’re using a
Data-Processing staffer or other internal person, you still may want to
find out his track record. Don’t be a corporate chauvinist. Every
company has its share of gobblers.
Turning to an outside consultant? Then, through computer stores, you
might try to track down a local users group for a brand of hardware or
software. Go to a meeting. Find out whom the members regard as an ace
consultant. In fact, try to go to several user groups—remember the
preference that Apple owners, say, may have in favor of an Apple
solution or that Kaypro owners may have in favor of a Kaypro one. Mere
word of mouth, though, is still no substitute for a thorough interview
with the consultant and reference checks. Certainly, too, you can’t use
a consultant just because he or she shows up in the directory of a
consultants group. Charles E. Harris, a lawyer who, with Joseph Auer,
wrote _Computer Contract Negotiations_, says, “I know of no
organizational membership that proves anything other than membership and
the fact that the man’s paid his dues.”
“The person to watch out for in particular is the guy who’s doing this
part time and he works on a mainframe or something like that,” warns
Mark Robinson, a California consultant. He’s been in the micro business
for years and handles dealer relations for Lexisoft, a software
company—a micro one, mind you. “Anybody who hasn’t made this his
business full time for a significant period of time,” he said of micro
consulting, “is a great risk.” Consultants can relax. Robinson said
eighteen months could be “significant.” I myself wouldn’t shrug off the
part timers from Data-Processing departments if they have a long list of
pleased micro clients. But as a generality Robinson’s observations seem
valid. Not only is micro software written differently from the mainframe
kind; there’s also a different mentality. Cloistered away in the
computer rooms, some mainframers may strive for technical perfection at
the expense of economy. “They may be right about things,” Robinson says,
“but that’s not the point. The point may be more like what Mr. Osborne
prates about all the time—mere adequacy. I’m thinking of posting an
aphorism on the wall from _The Soul of a New Machine_: not everything
worth doing is worth doing well.”
The same wisdom might apply to consultants. You don’t need a
$1,500-a-day man to help you choose a good micro for word processing—not
unless you’re about to buy a few hundred. Opinions vary about pay. Some
observers of consultants say you get what you pay for. “There’s very
little relationship between pay and value except for one thing,”
Robinson says. “People who don’t charge enough eventually go out of
business, or that business. If they don’t charge enough, they’re not
likely to have been around long enough to have gotten experience for
you.”