Something all too rare happened to me last week. I was flattered when I received a questionnaire from Pick Systems, asking for input regarding their priorities and future enhancements to Pick. Well, to be honest, Pick Systems didn't send it to me personally – it was addressed to their dealers and licensees. I consult with several of their licensees and it was one of them who actually asked for my option on the questionnaire. Still, I was impressed with the thought of Pick Systems asking anyone outside the company for input. You certainly didn't see them doing this in the past. It is one of the surest signs I've seen that they are beginning to mount a serious attempt to change for the better.

You know, failing to "take a pulse" from time to time and stay in tune with the needs of your customer base is probably one of the biggest failures of the modern business world in general, and of the computer trade in particular. I apologize in advance to all the vendors who feel they have done a great job in this area, but all too many of them have the same problem that is still evident on the Pick survey. You all spend ninety percent of your time asking for input and priorities on what you are already committed to doing. This is self-serving and tantamount to a sales pitch. Rarely are there any real incentives in the other ten percent to explain "what else should we do?".

I'm old enough to remember how some companies used to hold serious (and I do mean serious) lost sales postmortems. Why did we lose the sale? What did the competition have that we didn't? How does our product, presentation, people or company have to change so we will win the next one? When was the last time you hear of a company doing a serious exit interview on departing employees? Or a serious competitive analysis instead of a self serving, product positioning "white paper"?

Why is it people afraid to ask the tough questions today? Or don't they remember how anymore? Personally, I don't have a good answer to this question. I do have a repeated observation. When you think about it, this is the pure essence of ISO9000. Looking in your successes for way to improve is never as productive as looking into your failures. Ask yourself if your company (no matter what field you're in) is attempting any of these kinds of things? Then ask the tough question – why not?

Vendors who don't ask the customers what's important to THEM (the customers) are simply "selling solutions looking for problems" and there is all too much of that in the computer business today. Service providers who ask customers and (of course) who listen to the answers, will be "providing solutions for real needs" and will be the long term survivors. Soap boxes are addictive and I've been on this one too long. Lets get back to the point.

The point is Pick has a whole lot of strengths, but it won't ever have enough to ignore its customers. I'd like to ask the people who really know the issues to share them with us all. Who really knows the issues? Why, you do. You, the VARs who are building applications and competing with the other data bases. You, the end users who are having a difficult time controlling your applications and explaining to upper management why you can't do the new project on Pick. And you too, over in the corner – the people who are moving off of Pick for some other "holy grail". Share your hard won (and hard lost) knowledge with the rest of the MultiValue community.

At the risk of biasing your thoughts, I'd like to venture just a few of my own. First, no matter how messed up you think your operations group is, everyone else is really in the same boat. Administration tools of all kinds are a critical need. User and security admin, tape/backup admin, spooler admin, etc. Second, Pick Basic has always been a powerful, flexible language, but it is never easy to write and maintain major applications that can have 5,000 to 10,000 programs. A good set of programming support tools to help map data and code dependencies and to do change control would go a long way to restoring Pick's programming productivity edge and making it more acceptable outside our little enclave. Lastly, after all these years its literally a sin that Pick machines can't talk to each other more less the outside world. The only half decent communications tools are third party products. Its an Open World and standard data base interconnect tools such as ODBC and SQL between Pick machines and between Pick and everything else are an absolute must.

Let me hear from YOU! What does Pick need to continue to be your solution of choice? The list of possible areas is nearly infinite so please keep the discussion to your short list of truly important, high level ideas. No new user exits or Basic statements please. Write me here in care of News and Review, or e-mail me at Tim@HollandConsulting.com. When I've received a good sampling of your thoughts and desires, I'll summarize them and publish them in this column. Maybe, just maybe, together we can convince the remaining vendors to listen to us.