[thelist] Re: A Different POV

[Bill Haenel]

> <snip from one message>
> Another common cause of not documenting is that it is not seen as a
> sufficiently important business cost.
> </snip>
>

> If it is not seen as a sufficiently important business cost it's
> because it
> really hasn't come up yet. I have some stories that would curl your hair
> and your budget.

As I said before, I used to be in the industrial testing instruments
business. Almost everything we did was tied to standards, procedures and
documentation. Specifically, we manufactured coating thickness measurement
devices. Oddly enough, this little niche part of the measurement world did
not come around to ISO or ASTM compliance until a few years ago! Until then,
it was a chaotic mess. With no standards to live by, great numbers of
sleeping dollars were wasted for many, many years by companies who coated
(painted) too much or too little, and either spent too much on paint or
plating or whatever, or had to go back in a year or two to redo the work
because it was not durable enough to hold up to the contract's requirements.
Nobody even realized this was happening much until you couldn't sell a
coating thickness gage without a "ISO 9000 Registered" mark on your
advertisements. That's when it made a REAL financial difference.

It's all a very long story, but bottom line is that this web dev world we
live in is going in the same direction. There is great opportunity for all
to make money. When you can sell more product and leave your customer with
greater confidence by slapping a "seal of approval" on your product, more
people will buy it. It creates a demand not for the product, but for the
"seal". We need that here.

BH