New boss of tif calls for software that works

Whatever next?

By John Oates, 6th May 2004

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

The new chairman of tif, the UK body for enterprise IT users, is calling on the software industry to pull its socks up and improve quality.

Denise Plumpton was previously UK IT director for TNT and is soon to start a new job as IT chief for handset maker Sendo. She will continue tif's campaign to encourage software vendors to improve software quality.

She said the campaign had been successful in getting the issue talked about, but "we now need to work closely with software developers to produce a plan of action that will address the problem in a way that is commercially viable for them.

"This is an ongoing area of concern for tif. members who are comparing information about suppliers and levels of service and are demanding a higher level of professionalism and maturity from them."

Plumpton complains that software vendors reliance on patches to secure code is "a costly headache" for users.

She said suppliers need to be "called to account for the fact that they produce sub-standard software and because they are shifting the blame to their customers accusing them of pressing for the rapid release of new versions and not allowing them the time to test software, which is just not true.

"The constant release of new versions causes a lot of grief for IT professionals and CIOs would much prefer to wait for something that actually works and is not full of bugs."

The Corporate IT Forum - tif - represents the views of 3,000 senior IT directors and managers from some of Europe's largest businesses. It has members from half the FTSE100 companies on the LSE who together control £20bn on annual IT spending. ®