[Trinidad]

Coming back to a recent discussion in a highjacked thread. According to the San Fransisco Daily Bulletin, the ACBL is going to write a new scoring program. I am getting the impression that they are going to reinvent the wheel. I hope I am wrong.

It seems that ACBL members can give suggestions. Maybe some of you could do that and save ACBL some money (unless the suggestions will go immediately to the software developers who will ignore suggestions like: "buy it on the market").

Rik

[Vampyr]

Trinidad, on 2012-November-25, 02:47, said:

"buy it on the market"

Surely this is the only suggestion that is even remotely sensible.

[paulg]

The web site for the project is http://www.acblscoreplus.com/.

I've always been a supporter of adapting your business processes to the commodity software that's available. However most businesses prefer the alternative, endlessly customising commodity software to make it non-commodity and paying the big services companies huge amounts of money to develop and maintain it.

In this case however the ACBL is the only meaningful customer for the product and there is no commodity software to speak of. Although I expect that there are a number of potential software suppliers, they are all small companies and a contract with the ACBL would dwarf all other contracts. The only way for the ACBL to protect its investment is to play a major role in the project.

[Vampyr]

paulg, on 2012-November-25, 06:09, said:

Although I expect that there are a number of potential software suppliers, they are all small companies and a contract with the ACBL would dwarf all other contracts. The only way for the ACBL to protect its investment is to play a major role in the project.

I don't see the relevance of the size of the company if they offer a quality product.

[Trinidad]

paulg, on 2012-November-25, 06:09, said:

In this case however the ACBL is the only meaningful customer for the product and there is no commodity software to speak of.

What do you mean that the ACBL is the only meaningful customer? Is the ACBL the only bridge league in the world? Or are the American bits and bytes different from those in the rest of the world? Yes, the ACBL is the biggest bridge league in the world, but it is not like it is orders of magnitude bigger than the others. The ACBL has 165,000 members, the NBB (from The Netherlands) has 115,000. For the purpose of this kind of projects I would say that they are of similar size.

Of course, the ACBL has wishes that the Dutch don't have, and the other way around. But does that mean that the wheel needs to be reinvented? Or could they just ask the suppliers of the Dutch (or any other) wheel to adapt that wheel to fit the needs for ACBL?

paulg, on 2012-November-25, 06:09, said:

Although I expect that there are a number of potential software suppliers, they are all small companies and a contract with the ACBL would dwarf all other contracts. The only way for the ACBL to protect its investment is to play a major role in the project.

I don't think that should be a problem. I must first say that I certainly don't know the details, so the story below may not be entirely accurate, but I think the big picture is.

The Dutch system has been developed and is run by Transfer Solutions. This is an ICT company that doesn't have anything to do with bridge. They do all kinds of other ICT projects for banks and insurers or something like that. The thing is that high in the organization (maybe even owners) they have some top bridge players and they actively recruit their developers from the bridge community (since that is a pond with a lot of fish with the analytical skills needed in system development).

These connections brought the two together. The NBB was sure that they would get a reputable IT company that would understand what bridge players would like in a system, because the developers would be bridge players. Transfer Solutions runs the Dutch bridge league system as one of many IT systems. If they would get the ACBL as a customer, I don't think that it would make them nervous.

Rik