Miscellaneous Claptrap

I work for a BU, a Business Unit subdibvision of the mighty Cobham plc and we all got a wonderful email at work today, well, when I say “we” I mean those of us in the “engineering” section and before you ask, no, we don’t all wear red shirts and when I say “wonderful” I mean… well, you decide.

The mail itself was from the, wait for it, wait for it…  from the Executive Vice President of Engineering.
Oh yes, he’s not just a Vice President you know, he’s an Executive Vice President, more power to his elbow and somehow he has managed to scale the slippery heights of Executiveness by putting out the sort of stuff below, I won’t reproduce the whole message because it’s far too boring but here for your delectation are a few choice excerpts:

“SOF E vs SOF R&D; In the early development stages of the … Engineering Council it became quite apparent that SOF E alone could not facilitate technology growth … SOF E worked well when you had a set of fixed requirements to design and develop to, but not so well in the early stages when Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) were low and you were still in an investigative/creative mode.”

With me so far? No, I’ve no idea what SOF E is or does and in the message no explanation was offered; top of the quick Google search I made was The 27th IEEE Symposium On Fusion Engineering but I doubt very much if that is what His Executive Vice Presidentness of Engineering was on about and quite honestly I’d be bloody scared if it was.
He continued:

“Whether it is utilizing Innovation Bursts, Technology Road Maps, Seed Funding, Rewards and Recognition for Intellectual Property (IP) generation, TRL Reviews or other SOF R&D tools, the whole idea is to reach out in front of our current product and technology offerings to find solutions to our customers current and future needs.”

Now this is interesting, as well as solutions to our current and future needs he also wants to find solutions to our customers. Solutions to our customers eh? Maybe he left out a lot of commas or maybe there was supposed to be an apostrophe in there somewhere but who am I to second guess an Executive Vice President? Well, I’ve got to say that if we continue to be driven on our present course then eventually customers will be few and far between so perhaps that’s the solution he’s looking for.

Back to the email, surely if you are trying to engage with your audience then you have to start by speaking in their language and you certainly don’t kick off with a load of acronyms without first introducing and explaining them. It reminded me of a PowerPoint presentation that was received last year, oh yes, I’ve still got it, you never know when these things might come in useful. It was mailed out by, and this too is a good one, the Business Operating System Service Delivery Director. Just imagine being a BOSSDD, what fun that must be.
Anyway, the presentation: the title on slide 1 was:

CBOS Solution Overview
Core components, scope and functionality

The heading on slide 2:

CBOS Components
Not just CRM, EBS and OBIEE

It was at that point that I stopped reading even though there were 13 more pages. What do these people think that they are achieving writing stuff like that? Maybe it’s a touch of, “I understand it therefore I am superior to you”, maybe they’re all just wazzocks with their heads far too far up their own orifices.