Strategic Solutions Provider

I recently received an email from a friend of mine. The content of the email is irrelevant, except for the signature:

About Us: [Company X] provides advanced asset management solutions for community sustainability and investment optimization. Our mission is to deliver the benefits of infrastructure performance management with cost-effective technology and services while keeping innovation, continuous improvement and growth management top-of-mind. Our knowledge portal is a destination for best-practices, tools, news, blogs and other continuously updated resources. Our technology is an on-demand platform for monitoring, planning and optimizing your assets. Our team consists of cross-functional domain expertise in engineering, operations, finance and IT with both practitioners and consultants.

Bingo!!

Q1 2007 All Hands Meeting

My company hosts a quarterly all hands meeting. It's the executives' attempt to better communicate with employees. Its purpose is ironic, since they tell us nothing of consequence, in fact, they usually try to avoid telling us anything of importance (our best source of such information is the mainstream press).

These meetings are chock full of business speak. For the first few meetings I was in awe. OK, not in awe, rather I was entirely confused. What they were talking about sounded so complicated, I couldn't imagine how they could keep talking so coherently, never mind drive the strategic goals they were synergizing in real time. Then I realized it was all an act. It was their way of showing us how sophisticated they are, thus proving they are leadership material. They sound like they're talking with their mouths full of marbles.

It's rather a social obligation to attend these meetings, even though they're useless. To pass the time, I collect stats on business speak used. For each executive I tally up how many times they use each term. Below is a chart, showing the totals for everyone:


Until next time, valued partners. Going forward I urge you to leverage your core competencies to add value to your solutions, thus growing market share and establishing yourself as a leading player in the space.

Field Report

On Monday of last week I attended a meeting. The substance of the meeting is irrelevant to this report. In fact, the substance of the meeting may have been irrelevant to all who attended as well.

Here is a short list of phrases that made me grind my teeth in helpless frustration.

• go forward (used 3 times)


• round table (used 2 times. It turns out that it wasn't actually a meeting, it was a round table).


• pushback


• communication channel


• go around the block on this


• impact (used as a verb. This annoys me.)


• ascertain and determine (used at least twice. You shall not use these verbs by themselves. They must to be together as a pair, and in this order).


• that being said (used at least twice. Another pet peeve of mine)


• keep us in the loop


• throw/punt it over the wall


• speak offline (this means discuss after the meeting)


• touch base


• churn


• methodology


• captured (you can't just write things down in the minutes, you have to capture things)

What's with 2.0?

I take it Tiger is re-inventing himself.

I'm not a reader of Sports Illustrated, but if I was, I would never read it again. I bet the editor who came up with that splashy title for the cover thought he was pretty clever.

What does it mean for something to be 2.0? In particular, what does it mean when some software is at 12.0? Does that mean that the software is light years ahead of everything else (social trends, economic policy, sports strategy) which is only currently ramping up to 2.0?

The people who invented this are annoying. They're a group of self-proclaimed experts on social trends. Five years ago they didn't even know how to turn on a computer. To them, the internet was just for geeks. Ah, those geeks, what losers to play with their computers. Let them have the internet, we have ideas.

Then, some time in the middle of last week, the internet suddenly got interactive. They still don't know how to turn on their computers, but they've got blogs and important things to say: The web is now at 2.0. They need not concern themselves with the technical details anyway, just leave it to the web 2.0 labourers, the geeks.

Thanks guys, but I'm not going to upgrade my internet to 2.0. I'm keeping it at 1.7. There aren't as many morons using 1.7.

Performant

This is a word that you hear quite often in the software world. This one actually has a real definition in the dictionary. So why am I complaining about this word, you ask?

When people around me use the word performant they use it as an adjective that in their warped minds means high performing:

Genius A: The code has passed all test cases.
Genius B: Super. But is it performant?
Genius A: Hmmm. Good point. Going forward, my key Action Item is to tabulate some metrics to establish whether the integrated system is sufficiently performant.
Genius B: Huzzah!
Genius A: Indeed.

Hey Geniuses (A and B), I invite you to read the definition that I linked to in the first paragraph. Performant is a noun, basically a synonym of performer. performant:performer :: informant:informer.

Right now the descriptivists are shaking their heads at me in pity. Language evolves they say. Well I say that they are just crypto-apologists for the lazy and stupid. It's true that languages change over time but that doesn't mean we should all stand by idly while the foundations are hacked at by a sleepy mob armed with dull axes.

Is informant being used as a synonym of informative yet? Has performant been made into an adverb yet? That is, are people out there saying: This code runs very performantly. Honestly, I'm afraid to google it to find out.

External Resources: Jeff Boulter's Blog: Performant is not a word.

Spare Cycles?

Can someone explain to me what spare cycles are? This morning I overheard a conversation asking whether someone had spare cycles. So I did a quick search. All that was returned were links about spare bicycles and spare CPU cycles. Last time I checked, I was neither. But I should stop whining, especially since, as a strategic member of the corporate unit, my resources should be utilized to leverage spare cycles towards target deliverables for the near term, going forward.

In the Wild

Dear AI Team Members,

You'll be glad to know I've returned safely from my fact finding mission. Expense report to be submitted shortly (it's a doozy!)

Find specimen below - more to follow.

In 1991, the team at the OTF Group pioneered competitiveness as part of the Monitor Group. Today, the OTF Group continues to be the thought leader on competitiveness in developing economies and emerging markets, and is a software development company leveraging technology to support its Country Competitiveness™ and Strategy Coaching™ practices.