2007 POS Software Scoreboard

For the past three years, Hospitality Technology has published an annual Point of Sale Software Scoreboard with its July/August issue. The Scoreboard is based on results of a survey that asks HT readers and other IT users to evaluate POS software systems on a variety of criteria. From those results, we publish a Top 20 list of systems, both overall and across various categories, such as ease of upgrade, total cost of ownership and others.

This year, we again began collecting data for the POS Software Scoreboard, polling the end user population (IT decision makers at restaurant companies) via an online survey. Once this year's data was compiled, we set to work with the help of a research partner to tabulate and evaluate the results.

In any survey, there are certain criteria that should be met to ensure that the data is valid, such as: does the number of responses represent a sufficient sample size; are there any indicators of response bias; does the data pool include sufficient representation of respondents across sub-categories (i.e., size of restaurant); etc.

This year's data was unable to satisfy all of the validity criteria. To protect the integrity of HT, the POS vendor community, and most importantly to respect the trust our readers place in us, we have decided to cease production of the POS Software Scoreboard.

As for the future of the POS Software Scoreboard, Hospitality Technology will examine alternative research methods that would help eliminate some of the potential for invalid data. We will keep our readers posted on the possibility of future publication.

Hospitality Technology sincerely thanks all those who responded to the survey. We will continue to work hard to bring our readers the latest IT news, trends and developments affecting the hospitality industry. The industry can continue to rely on Hospitality Technology for unbiased news and information, and be confidant in the fact that Hospitality Technology puts editorial ethics at the forefront of all its endeavors.