Standards – Part 14 – Auditing parking companies
An audit should be conducted on the processes a parking company adopts and not on the intellectual property. This could be from being relatively simple to immensely complex. What should NOT be happening is an audit of the contractual relationships between domain owners and the parking company. This would be far beyond the scope of this type of audit and would fall into the domain of a public company audit.
A first stage audit could commence by the audit company collecting statistics on each parking company in secret for randomly selected domain names with a sufficiently large enough volume of traffic to be statistically meaningful.
This traffic could then be compared against the standards and the results openly published and announced at TRAFFIC with a score rating for each parking company for each level of the standards.
All parking companies would be audited in this manner and for a fee (to assist in supporting the endeavour) any parking company could use the data as a part of their promotional literature. An additional fee could be applied to parking companies that wish to receive information on their competitor’s performance. This is similar to the approach used to secretly rate restaurants. Domain name owners could also subscribe to the data so that they can make more informed decisions on which parking company is more likely to provide value for their traffic.
To gain additional credit and kudos parking companies could request an internal audit where an auditor would spend several days checking systems to ensure that they are of a higher standard. A “gold seal” could be then applied to these companies.
The audit would include things such as hosting environment, back-procedures, payment policies, payment reality, support processes and procedures etc. In my view this is likely to be an extremely positive process for most parking companies and could lead to the establishment of a “world’s best practice for parking”. To retain this elite status and all of the rights to go with it a parking company would need to go through this process on a bi-annual basis.
Prior to embarking on this great crusade there are a number of questions about this process that would need to be explored.:
Who would do the audit?
Would this be beneficial to parking companies?
What would the impact of this for domainers?
Would domain owners change their parking behaviour on the basis of such an audit?
Would the economic incentives warp the reporting of the audit so that the parking companies would receive a clean bill of health because they are ultimately paying the bill?
Would domain name owners pay for access to more detailed information in the audit?
Would the stage one audit be believed by the domaining community?
Would the stage two audit be sufficiently detailed to make it meaningful?
These questions will be discussed and the various options explored in future articles.
Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmour — Reprinted with permission — April 2, 2008
Tags: companies, parking, Part 14, Standards –, – Auditing