Comments on: KISS - the time has come

By: alan

alan — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:14:32 +0000

how about starting by not calling it ICT?

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By: Samantha Perry

Samantha Perry — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:40:33 +0000

@Adrian *grin* Shh, you’ll let the secret out

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By: Adrian

Adrian — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:04:40 +0000

Good post, Sam! But how would we sell all the new stuff if we had to admit that it was still based on zeroes and ones?

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By: Samantha Perry

Samantha Perry — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:51:54 +0000

@Ismail - too true. How often do the words ‘paradigm shift’, or ‘thinking out of the box’ or ‘expanding boundaries’ make it into Powerpoint presentations? Someone should get a group together like the Plain English group in the UK. Now that would be a lot of fun, and maybe, just maybe, we could get people to understand each other for once.

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By: Ismail Dhorat

Ismail Dhorat — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:41:33 +0000

Great post and makes a whole lot of sense, a few points:

I once read a study which said that one of the main reasons hindering performance and knowledge sharing in corporate environments is buzz words and acronyms. This was not only amongst ICT companies but across the board, but they found that this was more prevalent when it came to ICT infrastructure and systems and quote obviously IT departments. They also found that within companies new jargon and buzz words would be created that would confuse new people.

Now, when you consider ICT an think of it as one huge corporation most people outside of it wouldn’t understand the buzz words / acronyms. Having said that sometimes certain concepts would be difficult to explain in a short way, therefore words are created for them. Think of the word as a HYPERLINK, that you can use to get further information. As an example, Web 2.0 is a term that is thrown around often(Actually everything 2.0) now to explain that would take time, so you just use that word and if the user would like to know more there is always wikipedia.

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By: Samantha Perry

Samantha Perry — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:09:13 +0000

Heh - I worked at IS, in the PR department. I also worked in Telkom’s PR department (now that was an eye-opener!).

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By: Muhammad

Muhammad — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:50:17 +0000

Haha! I totally agree… I remember applying for a marketing post at Internet Solutions and them telling me… “Umm… the marketing department is very small, do I doubt there’ll be any opportunities…”

In the context of your post this makes sense, because they just don’t know how to sell their product, simply. The reason they fall back on jargon and waffle is because that’s all they know. God forbid they should face a journalist who starts hammering them with questions… they might get a heart attack!

On the point though, Somebody please give the IT Sector some basic English Skills!

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