Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Buzzwording continues?

the IT industry is very innovative in creating and consuming buzzwords. from year to year at least one new trend alongside with one or more buzzwords are created.

main reason for that success is the corresponding visibility and based on that the opportunity to get budget. the main characteristic of such terms is that there are no formal definition of what is really the essence / definition of such term but on the other hand everybody seems to have a clear and complete understanding and definition for the term / buzzword.

second characteristic of such terms is that a common trend is associated with those terms.

and last but not least the life cycle of such trends are pretty similar, approx. 1/2 year until everybody is aware of it (through publications, blog posts, articles), 1 year highest awareness incl. associated investments and at the end the trend will be replaced by next one.

that looks pretty similar to fashion industry and in my point of view there is not too much structural differences between a new fashion trend and a IT trend.

just a small list of buzzwords from the last few years:

why is it possible to make money with those trends? because all of them promising to solve real existing problems in real industry. if we use the trends mentioned above their main focus is to

  • consistent access to required information at the right time at the right place
  • get rid of increasing IT complexity
  • get rid of proprietary vendor driven information silos
  • reduce Total cost of ownership for hosting the available information within a company
  • improve collaboration between different business groups
  • improve adaptability to changing business requirements
  • ....
if we take the essence of the mentioned buzzwords and collect them again than the following is really promising
  • usage of dedicated and well defined services for business automation
  • pay for usage of a defined service level instead of paying for hardware / software and corresponding maintenance (what really cares is the service that automates a certain business step)
  • architecture that adapts fast and controlled to change of business requirements (changed SLA) and not to changed IT requirements
  • .....
the trends above of course drives the creation of standards, software and services makes those requirements easier to fulfill but still it still hard work and more than just using those nice buzzwords.....

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