Awesome Vendor-Speak
I received an unsolicited ( I’ve tried to unsubscribe several times there, techtarget ) email today, that I actually happened to open because it advertised an “integrated maturity model for governance and security”. Yeah, I’m a sucker like that. This is what I read:
…a practical maturity model with illustrative use cases that can be used as a roadmap to quickly transition the Enterprise through the following states: Ungoverned Services, Centralized Service Proxy, Runtime Governance, and finally Policy Driven SOA/Security. The roadmap presents actionable “zero code” steps that can be implemented with existing infrastructure and off the shelf solution components that will accelerate the attainment of an integrated governance model and demonstrable ROI.
It’s like poetry for the information age, isn’t it? Or poetry when the poet is inspired by massive amounts of horse tranquilizers, opiates, and fried peanut butter and bacon sandwiches surging through their veins.
I could use those horse tranquilizers and opiates after reading that, myself.
What I want to know is just how many paradigms I can shift out of the box with this proven solution offering? Let’s put a pin in it and circle back with some answers.
@shrdlu – what, no love for peanut butter and bacon sandwiches?
@andrewhay – I feel like that might be boiling the ocean. Let’s find a more granular solution…
This sort of semantic goo used to trigger paroxysmal seizures in my brain, especially when I was sitting right next to the people writing it.
I used to think that the authors were just plain idiots. I now have an alternate theory I call the “Parrot Theory of Competence”. These people *want* to understand complex technical and business ideas, but something limits their understanding to a superficial level. Undaunted, they *feel* like they are *really* understanding the concepts according to the degree that they can *mimic* the langauge used by those who really understand it. They get strokes and affirmations from people around them when they get good enough at the mimicry, just like a parrot does when the learn the master’s favorite sayings, or those rare dogs who learn to say something like “I love you”. The dog and the parrot don’t really know anything about “love”, “you”, or “I”, or why speaking such sounds would have meaning in the listener. But because of the strokes they receive, they feel *really* good about their competence.
Of course, the fun really begins when people get surrounded by birds of a feather (mimics), and then skill at mimicry becomes *more* important that real competence. Deep dysfunction soon follows.