Two former BearingPoint IT pros have come forward to put their names on comments about the bankrupt consulting firm. So we're off into a new kind of reporting -- done iteratively, and in public.

Lyle Brown, a onetime senior network architect, and Tom Davies, who had been responsible for IT strategy, architecture and implementation, took us up on our offer to post strong responses to an interview with CIO Eric Goldfarb if commenters used their real names, or spoke to editors about their reasons for requesting anonymity.

Brown took us to task for running a "a nice fluffy article with no substance" in the first place. Fair enough. We hope readers get value from the article -- a CIO talking to his peers - but clearly there is a deeper story to be told about life at a big company in distress.

We'd like to tell that story.

We're not interested in publishing recriminations and he said/she said narratives. Goldfarb did not blow up the economy, or make the decisions that doomed BearingPoint, which had some longstanding issues. Potshots at him are not the point here.

What's interesting are questions about what IT might have done differently, and life inside a hurting company, and the view of customers and their own issues.

Here's what Davies had to say about BearingPoint as things got bad:

At one point the knowledge management system was seventeen iterations behind the current standard...

...In terms of training, there was precious little initiated by IT. Once the bankruptcy was announced they have been [sic] desperately dumping training credits on staff. These had been held back and were about to expire as they had in prior years. Training, other than corporate sponsored training, was always an afterthought.

That's the kind of stuff we're looking for -- specific, sourced statements that tell us something about the IT function within a damaged company. It's the sort of thing you'd see in a traditional, reported article.

And the next thing you'd see was some context provided by the company. We hope that BearingPoint will contribute to this ongoing project as well. We'll post what we get here, adding context as we go along, and holding everyone to the same community standards. All entries will be tagged "BearingPoint," making it easy to follow the series. At some point, we may have enough to create a formal article.

Let's see where it goes.