“And that doesn’t include the thousands of dollars in business we lost because our computer was down at the wrong times.
“I had to lay off five people largely because of the consultants’ lack of interest in anything but turning a buck off us.”
Stewart’s story illustrates the need for the Who-How Solution in hiring consultants. Who-How may also help micro users train employees and get the most out of their data-processing departments.
Who-How is nothing more than the five Ws and the H of newspaperdom. Like a reporter, you simply ask, “Who?” “What?” “Why?” “When?” “Where?” and “How?” and especially “How much?” Ask those questions often. Ask them when:
1. Deciding whether to hire a computer consultant. How much in your time and your people’s will it cost not to have one?
2. Hiring and using a consultant. It isn’t just a matter of asking, “Who?” Ask, too, “Who cares?” Who cares about a consultant’s two decades with IBM? What counts is how much he can do for you. Is the IBM experience relevant?
3. Training employees. Don’t clutter your people’s minds with computerese not related to their jobs. Use the five Ws and the H to strip the training to the basics—which, by the way, almost surely won’t include BASIC.
4. Working with your company’s data-processing people. Know which questions to ask to find out the computer crew’s true attitudes about micros. And come up with the right answers of your own if the mainframers feel threatened by your interest in do-it-yourself computing. Good data-processing people, however, won’t be frightened—quite the reverse.
The scary aspect of Frank Stewart’s consultant fiascoes is that he and his people were hardly lost amid high tech.
“Some of us were inventors,” Stewart said, and his vice-president, Bob Hillard, even had a smattering of the FORTRAN programming language. Stewart’s firm didn’t rush blindly into computerization. Originally, it had been hand culling articles from 140 periodicals and 16 major daily newspapers. “We sat down,” Hillard recalled, “and worked out a mathematical formula to give weight to a particular article by mention of certain words, certain individuals, certain companies.” Existing data bases like The Source and Dialog just wouldn’t do. You couldn’t easily use them to search out the political patterns affecting the fortunes of Stewart’s clients.