Foolish End Users, Tricky Integrators - What To Do?

Real world is saying me that business is managed by end user's purchasing dept. If your solution is lower in price than your competitors, you get the contract, even if such solution will not work. After contract awarding the stuff is passed to operations' dept. and in the last it will be their failure if the systems don't work. This without taking into consideration that, due to the long time passing between all phases of the project (years probably), the specific persons involved in the deal at the beginning will be involved in other projects in other countries, and with them all responsabilities will be gone. My 2 cent...

Jeremy, excellent comment and question.

I have similar stories with consultants. On more than one ocassion, I have talked with a consultant who spec'd a new product that he had neither tested nor was certain when it would come out (i.e., "it's scheduled for 3 months from now"). That's craziness and opens up a huge amount of risk.

You ask, "Do manufacturers need to do more to prove new technologies in a real world environment?"

Absolutely but the tougher question is "Are manufacturers motivated to prove their new technologies work in a real world environment?" Unfortunately, most of them are not. There is little to gain and a lot to lose if the technology is demonstrated as having problems. For them, better to sell on potential than to be blocked on proven failure.

When I saw the discussion title “Foolish End Users, Tricky Integrators - What To Do?”, my first thought was, “Yea! Finally a thread where consultants aren’t going to get bashed.” Wrong! It took a mere 4 comments before the consultant bashing started.

From what's described, these particular consultants seem to deserve the scorn, especially if they do this kind of stuff regularly as opposed to doing it once and then saying to themselves, "Boy! That was dumb. I'll never do that again." In general though, are security consultants really that uniformly bad, or is it just a matter of a few bad apples ruining the whole bunch?

Sincerely,

The Masked Consultant

Masked Consultant, my aim for this thread was not consultants. In my experience, consultants tend to err on the side of caution (just spec Pelco or Honeywell regardless) while integrators tend to err on the side of daring (let's put in this amazing new product that we have no idea will work).