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Skep's Pick: The IT Skeptic Awards for 2008 This link is here because...(hover)

terminology

Job title inflation is out of control

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2009-08-18 10:22. [nid:1599]
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Job title inflation is out of control. Mr X's job is to give "high-level strategy, corporate vision" to the suits at Fortune 500 clients of a US software vendor, and to do "orchestration of solution sales cycles". In other words he's a high-powered presales guy. His job title? Vice President. There was a time when a Vice President was the sidekick to the President. Now he's the sidekick to the salesman. I bet this is a salary-banding thing. Either that or corporate America has gone mad. Or both.

Terminological debasement of governance

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2009-06-14 01:27. [nid:1515]
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Two excellent publications recently commented on what I call terminological debasement of the term "governance".

What should IT call the Rest Of The Business?

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2009-03-11 18:44. [nid:1357]
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IT serves the Business. But we are all generally agreed that we must stop talking about "IT and the Business". IT is part of the business. The users of IT include IT itself. Talk of IT as a distinct entity ("align IT and the busienss") is a Bad Thing. So what should we call it?

The word all consultants and writers should avoid: "must"

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2009-03-11 04:35. [nid:1240]
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I am trying to drive a word out of my vocabulary: "must".

Terminological debasement: a committee becomes a board

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2009-01-21 08:16. [nid:1260]
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In a recent announcement from APMG, the IT Skeptic identifies a troubling new terminological debasement trend. Apparently a committee is now a board. We had the Combined Strategy Board, the ITIL Qualifications Board. Now we have the Foundation Review Project Board. Come to think of it, ITIL has been doing this for a while: since when was a CAB anything but a committee?

ITIL product compliance

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2008-07-23 22:08. [nid:263]
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[updated: it seems salient to revisit this post. To the vendor who proudly declared on this blog that your product is "ITIL aligned" you might like to measure that "alignment" against this list. ("Aligned" is the new slippery-speak now that "compliant" is on the nose)]

The IT Skeptic’s ITIL Compliance Alignment Criteria

ISO38500 may be too late; the word "governance" is rapidly equalling "management"

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2008-06-07 01:03. [nid:633]
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The word "governance" is in danger of total debasement. ISO38500 may be only half-cooked but that is because it arrived just in time... or perhaps too late.

What Governance Isn't

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2008-03-19 07:57. [nid:508]
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Governance is hot. "Governance" is the "in" word right now in IT. It is also a word that is suffering badly from terminological debasement, something the IT Skeptic has railed against on this blog before. Look for more on this in the near future.

collecting examples of terminological debasement

Blog entry submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2006-12-21 21:11. [nid:83]
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Maybe I'll start collecting examples of terminological debasement, such as

Debasement of IT terms

Audio submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2006-12-05 09:52. [nid:63]
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9:07 minutes (8.36 MB)

This is a podcast of the original article from the IT Skeptic: "Debasement of concepts by IT vendors and analysts" by the IT Skeptic.

The persistent erosion of meaning in IT terminology is a damaging practice endemic across vendors and analysts. When a concept gains some currency and everyone wants it, suddenly all the vendors have got it - often by re-labelling a feature of their existing product. And the analysts keep confusing the definition so no-one can call the vendors out for this obfuscation.

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