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"Cisco was unable to show that they knew what WV wanted" Yes, they have a contract. That is the best indication possible that the customer wants what you are s

"Cisco was unable to show that they knew what WV wanted" Yes, they have a contract. That is the best indication possible that the customer wants what you are selling. If I trust someone else with my money, and they transfer that trust over to a salesperson, then they have violated my trust. I don't want to hear about "blame to go around" and "the salesman should have sold us less stuff". Maybe apply some shame or sanctions to the salesperson, I suppose, but I really don't care unless there was some kind of kickback involved. Allowing the stewards of your money to redirect blame onto Cisco for selling too much stuff seems so overwhelmingly naive that I don't know where to begin.

dalke 14y ago
This is a modified version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If there is trust then overall costs go down and the number of sales goes up. This is a net win for both sides. If one side does not follow standard business practices, which the auditor argues happened here, then that one side may get better benefits. But this is actually an iterated prisoner's dilemma, and the standard tit-for-tat strategy of the Prisoner's Dilemma makes good sense. That is, shut out Cisco from future contracts for a period of time. This encourages future vendors, who want repeat business, to stay in a regime of trust and relieves WV of having to pay for staff with full domain expertise on all contract-related matters. A role of the auditors is to identify these problems after the fact and use debarment as a way to disincentivize this vendors from this behavior. This isn't naive. It's basic game theory.