Ownership continued

Some time after blogging about "Ownership" it so happened that I got into a meeting with a company that provides payment consulting services. The people of that consultancy company seemed nice and they certainly have been around the block a few times. After discussing a migration project, I was left with the impression that they knew what they were talking about.

As the conversation unfolded, we started broaching the topic of testing and certification. I quickly discovered that the consultants had a very different view of how testing and certification should be handled. I am of the opinion that when an end-user (a bank) wants to in-source their payment system, they should take ownership of all testing and certification activities and immerse themselves in these tasks.

To my initial surprise, I discovered that the consultants favored the extreme opposite approach. They pretty much wanted to come up with the test cases, execute the tests and be in charge of certification cycles. In short, they felt that it is preferable to them to get all over these tasks themselves than help the end-user do them.

"How can the end-user ever get off the ground if they do not own these processes?", I thought to myself. "How can the end-user even operate their own payment system and innovate with it if they can't even go through a test cycle themselves?".I presented these concerns to them. Their response was along the lines "We can provide this service to the end-user".

Some times I'm pretty slow but at this point I grasped the obvious difference between us. The consultants are trained to act on behalf of the end-user. They are hired by the end-user and most of the time adopt the viewpoint of the end-user. When they are successful in a project, they think and act as the end-user and in essence they are the end-user. On the other end of the spectrum lies the vendor that provides the payment system software - the vendor would be very comfortable just selling a license. I happen to sit comfortably in the middle. I work with payment system vendors and, when I'm successful, I help the end-users to integrate the payment system in their organization.

In the end, the consultants virtually re-validated my opinion: for an in-sourced payment system, the end-user must step up and take ownership of the system. Whether this is achieved by the end-user's own resources or by getting hired guns to do the job is a different matter. I'm not by default against getting consultants to run an operation and take on all the things that an end-user might find distasteful. Sometimes the conditions and the economics may be right to do just that, perhaps for a large retailer, a specialized processor or a global bank. But in the long run it just doesn't make sense for the average case. If continuous integration, patching, testing and certification activities appear to be more than an end-user can bear, there's a perfect alternative which is out-sourcing.