Am I smoking something illegal, or has our industry really started to lose the plot with the amount of buzz terms that – quite frankly – only mean something to the sellers and advisors trying to make their wares sound that little bit savvier than their competitors. And even then, I am not too sure whether many of them even fully understand what they are buzzing about either, more simply regurgitating what their competitors are saying.
I’m not trying to be a fuddy-duddy here, and I do empathize with the exuberance of so many sell-side individuals who are simply starry-eyed at all the disruptive technology and evolving business models that are on the horizon, but c’mon folks, can we find a sensible balance between vision and reality? Why has it become so uncool to talk about where we are, as opposed to where we think things might evolve in 5 years’ time?
I mean, wasn’t it barely six months ago when we were still having (relatively) meaningful debates about things such as:
- “What is innovation, and how can I get some of that?”
- “How can I find a provider to do something more for me than provide cheap labor”
- “I really would like some visibility over my order-to-cash process chain”
- “Our provider still can’t figure out how to automate our accounts payable processes”
- “Do we really get value from outsourcing all this stuff – are there other options to consider?”
Instead, suddenly it’s become terribly untrendy to have meaningful conversations about what we’re actually trying to achieve… like improving processes, trying to do a better job than merely maintain status quo operational performance, and accessing meaningful data to help us get more value from our day to day operations.
Yes, folks, if we aren’t creating Digital Services on SMAC platforms, we’re going to fail with Big Data and the Robots will come to replace us… so let’s see what 312 major buyers – in the brand new State of Outsourcing Study we conducted with KPMG – really understand about today’s latest slew of sexy savvy-sounding soliloquies:
All joking aside, there is a serious message here: too many buyers are getting lost in the verbiage and the lack of relevance to their businesses and simply don’t understand exactly what is being sold to them. Let’s be honest here, SMAC doesn’t mean anything to 70% of buyers beyond being a concoction of new technologies lumped together… finance executives have been talking about “Big Data” for four decades and nothing is really new except the fact there is better technology to help them analyze it… I can go on. Oh – and nearly a third of buyers don’t know what “transformation” means to their business? Seriously?
The Bottom-line: Our industry is simply terrible at communicating to clients and needs a major reality check
There is an abject communication problem in our industry, when such vast numbers of operations executives are baffled by the BS their providers and advisors are lobbing at them via boring white papers, instantly-forgotten PPT decks and thousands of automated inane tweets.
It’s time for the industry side to start tying all this buzz to the reality of operations – where we can educate how enterprises can learn more about where the world is heading, how they can start to evaluate the pace of change that will impact them and develop change programs and new operations strategies that make sense to their businesses.
We have got to stop jumping on the bandwagon of spewing poorly communicated rubbish that has little meaningful relevance to business today, and instead explain in plain English how processes and interactions can be digitized , how robotics could one day enable our business systems to become more cognitive and less reliant on manual steps, how new analytics tools and expertise can help our staff become more relevant and valuable, as opposed to turning widgets and updating spreadsheets. Most of the stuff I read today is focused 95% on flashy terminology and only 5% on the actual substance on what business can do with all this stuff.
It’s time to get meaningful people and stop this feeding frenzy of confusing jargon…
(Cross-posted @ Horses for Sources)
Time to stop the buzzword balderdash and become meaningful again is copyrighted by Phil Fersht. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.
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