I hereby vow: when something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

[tags]I suck less, sucky software, let\'s make this easier[/tags]

truer words have rarely been spoken…

[...] Why is it so hard to say that some things simply suck? I’ll quote Casey Bisson, quoting himself. [...]

Well, in that case, who’s the vendor and what’s the product?

Amen! I’m especially annoyed when people compare their pathetic program or system to an even more pathetic predecessor. Let’s hear it for higher standards of usability!

usability

John: I’m split about answering that, Two factors against it are: a) I wanted to address general problems and don’t want to distract it with specifics. And b) my talk is a little bolder than my approach. Other vendors already know I’m happy to tell them what sucks about their stuff, but I don’t know these folks yet.

If this was a pre-purchase situation, I’d take a bolder position. Sadly, the money’s already been spent — by people who hadn’t taken the pledge above.

Casey, this is very timely as I’m trying to pull together my final piece for ALA Techsource in “how opacs suck” (it’s interesting no one called you on the word “suck”–do guys get away with that term? :> ). This is the “meta-piece” where I talk about the bigger “how,” not the piecemeal details but the larger issues, which you ably touch on here.

The problem is that the people making decisions are still in a box where they believe they need to purchase A, B, or C and continue providing services The Way They Always Done It. In some ways they’re right. Deviating from the norm is slow, expensive, and risky. It’s particularly difficult when you don’t know where you want your product to go. It’s even harder in a profession that has had a chronic forest-for-the-trees problem with its software.

You have a lot of people who agree with your premise. The genius moment for you or anyone else will be figuring out what to do with it!

[...] Karen Schneider explains this beautifully in her response to Casey’s post: Q: Why Do Some Things Suck?. The problem is that the people making decisions are still in a box where they believe they need to purchase A, B, or C and continue providing services The Way They Always Done It. In some ways they’re right. Deviating from the norm is slow, expensive, and risky. It’s particularly difficult when you don’t know where you want your product to go. It’s even harder in a profession that has had a chronic forest-for-the-trees problem with its software. [...]

One other thing occurs to me wrt not disclosing the vendor and product: how do you know no-one from the company or training team is reading this blog? And why aren’t we relentlessly pushing open-source ILS software (eg Koha, Evergreen) instead of continuing to support the big, sucky vendors? I’ve just started working in systems librarianship after a longish career in corporate development (web and non-web), and what I’ve seen of the big vendors so far isn’t much different than any of the enterprise-level software I saw then. They all want to sell you a closed system for an outrageous amount of money and then run up the consulting and customization bills. Think Oracle, for example. The library world is really no different in this regard.

not that it’s commercial library software - but check out the philosophy and approach of delicious library - http://www.delicious-monster.com/.

[...] More than identifying individual vendors, I’d like this to be a discussion about our decision making processes. Let’s look carefully at how we got here — not to point fingers (for we are all responsible), but to plot a path out and try to make sure we never find ourselves here again. [...]

Excellent comments.

I have one though, what the heck is an opac?

I don’t think that libraries have spent enough time identifying potential competitors OR as mentioned, “what someone else could be doing.” Libraries have not challenged their own norms and are slowly becoming a dated model. In a discussion on digital libraries, someone once said to me, “Who’s to say the library-model is correct?” That’s always stuck with me when thinking about decisions to use or purchase different software and technology. Does this contribute to the overall growth of the forest, or is it just another tree…?

[...] I made some noise on this topic a while ago by asking people to take the pledge, but I’m also aware how difficult/unaproachable/distant/broken our purchasing processes are. Still, here’s an easy round up of what we should all take away from Dchud and Blyberg: [...]

[...] After a day/week/[insert preferred time period here] spent battling against the shortcomings of our ILS vendor’s software (who shall remain nameless) AND having to make apologies for those shortcomings to colleagues, my spirits were briefly lifted yesterday when I read Casey’s proposed mantra:When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.My mood darkened though as soon as I realized that ultimately what was needed was for our vendor to operate under a similar proviso, something along the lines of “We will not make software that sucks”. Sadly, I don’t think they are there yet. Well, at least it’s the weekend and I can think about something other than library software for a little while. [...]

Not to detract from Casey’s sentiment [which expressed an unnoticed feeling of mine very well], I have to say the user contributed tags at the bottom of the post are a bit juvenile.

@kgs: nobody “gets away” with saying “Suck” in a sentence these days — too many trolls just waiting to tag it with something dopey

@chris: thanks for exposing yet another “library truism”: Who’s to say the library-model is correct?