Once in Paris I bumped in to a restaurant called ‘The Honest Lawyer’, nice looking place. It’s on somewhere near Arc de Triomphe. At the time name sounded kind of funny because guided by restaurants name your first thought about lawyers will be quite opposite. But when you think of it more in detail, when lawyer is being dishonest it usually means that even if they don’t directly break any laws they are viciously taking advantage of ones lack of knowledge and trust. Most common purpose is probably to invoice by the maximum as long as they can.
So customer is being used by a party who 
should be considered trustworthy in every sense. Because necessarily it is not criminal and you cannot prove they are doing wrong, they much too often get away from it.
In Outsourcing Business
Let´s think of ICT outsourcing. In this business, similar model of taking advantage of another´s level of knowledge is also used. We are not meaning that customers are dumb, they are just not informed honestly enough about what they are getting within each agreement. Offers are not transparent because their sole purpose is to sell by any means. Have you ever heard of a service provider who tells you frankly that in real life, project will be late because of lack of personnel (and same applies to service delivery era), you will only get average of 89% availability for your services, you have to pay everything as an extra service because “it’s out-of-scope” they say.. And of course reporting is not delivered accordingly (because data may not even exist) and so on…
Now you are thinking that “Hey, at least were smart enough to require sanctions if agreed service levels are not kept”. Good for none we´d say. As in dishonest lawyers case, also in the world of outsourced ICT same applies; if you want to have refund because service was not as it was originally agreed, you´ll have to be able to prove it. But if the provider gives you reports where everything is OK, how do you do that. Gut feeling, annoyed end-user or not even an angry business management may not be enough. If you are able to get service provider to pay sanctions, the amount of refund usually does not cover your losses even close.
Who Wins?
At the end, almost everybody will lose something. Customer loses time, money and trust, service provider gains profit on short term, but will most likely lose its customer(s) and the whole industry suffers because of the bad reputation effect. So think, and think again.. The one who wins will be the honest one.
