The following is all about the benefits of being frank and open about things, so I’d like to kick off by revealing something I’m not particularly proud of.

One of my first jobs after college was as a researcher on a daytime television chat show. It wasn’t the type of programme where celebs, in the loosest sense of the term, are allowed to come on and dangle their new book in front of the screen for half an hour, but the confrontational kind where aggrieved lovers come on and throw shoes and insults at each other, or insist on a lie detector test to finally settle the argument over who left the television remote on the cooker hob that time.

Of all the shows that I worked on, my favourite had the title, “Sister, I am sick of you pretending to be a midget”. In that episode we were faced with the tricky challenge of trying to work out why said sister was under this delusion. The woman was actually of regulation height, but seemed determined to drive her brother nuts by going around acting as if she was only two feet tall.

For example, on entering a darkened room she would hop up and down pretending not to be able to reach the light switch. When eating, she would use garden tools instead of cutlery. And at the cinema, she would insist on sitting on a booster seat, much to the annoyance of the poor person sitting directly behind her and, indeed, the person behind them.

When she arrived at the studio she was dressed in clothes more suited to a munchkin. The woman had problems. It was ace.

Sadly, the long-term career prospects for a researcher working for a UK television freakshow are not good. I realised fairly early on that after a few months of dealing with these troubled wretches I’d end up like Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, staring into the green room and muttering “the horror, the horror”.
Now, of course, I write about IT users and vendors, who would never dream of airing their dirty laundry in public ­ which, I think, is a shame.

It is incredibly rare, when talking to either a vendor or customer, that I get to hear about something really juicy about, say, a bug-ridden piece of software, a botched integration project, or an outsourcing agreement that has gone pear-shaped. No one wants to admit that they are suffering, even when it isn’t their fault.

I know that there are understandable reasons for this reticence. Having servers that fall over more times than a narcoleptic drunk on a trampoline is hardly the kind of thing most companies would want to come clean about. And you can understand why a firm that suffers hacking attacks on its corporate web site would be reluctant to shout about it from the rooftops. Admitting that your systems have almost no security would be like committing professional suicide, which is why no one ever does it voluntarily.

This tendency to brush things under the carpet is regrettable, however, as I think much more openness among users would solve so many problems in the industry. Word of mouth is one thing, but a company going on the record as saying that a vendor solution is not up to a specific job would save other firms from going through the same problems, and would force the provider to do something to truly fix their technology once and for all, rather than just churn out yet another update.

Perhaps this kind of naming and shaming shouldn’t be done in the public eye, but other mechanisms do exist. I advise you to use them.