Can anyone actually make any sense of 'white papers'? Who finds them to be useful in terms of practical advice? Here is a selection of the latest to be sent to me (I've just put in the intros to save you from the real ugly stuff).
The new information agenda: do you have one?
An information agenda serves as both strategy and tactical roadmap,
bringing together the people, processes and technology necessary for a
CIO to transform information into a trusted business asset.
-- IBM's white paper library
Converged Service Delivery: the missing in achieving business flexibility
Converged Service Delivery is one of the emerging trends in Service
Delivery. Understand from leading industry analysts, Forrester
Research, how this model can benefit your business by reading their
latest "big idea" report.
-- Forrester (via ZDnet white paper section)
ITIL -- service approach for Siemens Enterprise Communications
The structure of ITIL is evolving from Version 2 to Version 3;
understand how the adoption and application of the ITIL framework can
add value to your enterprise, and how Siemens is taking the ITIL model
and using it to drive portfolio and proposition development, alongside
global service delivery capabilities.
-- Siemens white paper section
awful crap, isn't it. I always skip to the FAQ, where you can typically determine if the product/service actually works or not at least.
have you ever heard the term "enterprisey"? It's used to describe "enterprise" software's tendency to be overblown, over-architected, over-designed crapware that simply doesn't work once you get past the 1000s of pages of specification and API documents, and pay the 100s of consultants required to get it up and running. white papers are very enterprisey.
I think the big analysts have to shoulder a lot of the blame for this.
Posted by: Justin Mason | May 18, 2009 at 01:25 PM
Well it's all symptomatic really of the problems people seem to have with the English language these days. It's like somebody decided that plain simple words just wouldn't do and that the only way to sound smart was to conjure up all sorts of nonsense.
Posted by: Emmet Ryan | May 18, 2009 at 02:59 PM
Ha ha, yes I've heard that one, Justin. There's a lot of fat in this business. And not a lot of getting to the point.
Posted by: Adrian | May 18, 2009 at 03:00 PM
I know more than a few journalists like that, Emmet! (Present company excluded, of course.)
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