A friend of mine that runs a local office recently lost some of his hair. Actually, he pulled much of it out. Just last week. The IT company that used to service his company took a day to install Windows 7on his new computer; three days to install a new email server; and a half-a-day not to configure his Outlook software application.

Outlook was always my IT outsourcing group’s weak spot, as well. After several hours of screwing around with it, they would merely re-install all the Windows products on my laptop – only to charge over-time because the poor, incompetent technician had to work a couple hours after 5:30 in the evening. I refused to pay it. Of course, I’d then spend a man-day spread over a week re-configuring features the way I’d had them before my “little” problem – some productivity booster; their revenge, I suppose.

A British engineering manager friend that works at a local Fortune 500 manufacturing plant harumphed a couple days ago as he took a sip of beer and told us he had to arrange further training for his engineers in testing methodologies. The approach requires the diagnostician to collect data on systems problems, formulate hypotheses for errors, isolate and test and deduce the causes for error. One of his engineers, instead, was simply sticking his gauge inside a component, willy-nilly, based on not much more than his interpretation of randomness, no data at hand.

I asked the engineering manager what he thought China’s prospects were for becoming an innovation nation, like a South Korea or Japan. He merely shook his, looked pained at the memory of his engineer poking around componentry, baffled, and took another sip of beer. End of discussion.