Consultancy-speak emerged in the late 1990s, primarily in the Northern hemisphere (the so-called "Developed" World) and probably had its roots in the prevalent marketing-speak (or "bulls**t") that grew out of the quick-buck, acronym-friendly, hyphenated, noun-becomes-a-verb, Americanisms-invade-English, boom-bust Eighties. The germs of TLA-speak (Three Letter Acronym), can be genetically traced to the abbreviations (now why can't I call it an abbreviation anymore, huh?) used in 70s computing. An example is COBOL, the COmmon Business Oriented Language, which like the modern TLA could be made verb easily, as in "we could COBOLise a solution...". Which is completely meaningless, but now accepted in the Naughties (or whatever we call the first decade) as the norm. If in doubt, especially of your own grammar and vocabulary, then simply make up a new verb or noun or other expression. As you can tell from this poorly written text, language has degraded somewhat from the output of our forebears, Messrs Shakespear, Dickens, Byron, etc. to name but a few.
Anyone who wants to survive modern life must accept that the language we speak is not sacrosanct, and they must be able to adapt it on-the-fly (or OTF - see, I just made up a new TLA, easy-peasy), and be ready to deploy these new constructs on a JIT (that's "just in time") basis.
The examples are manifold, but I've drawn up the following paragraph of complete gibberish to convey the point:
Why "buy a paper from a newsagent", when you could just as easily "cross-charge against billable occupancy on a capped risk-reward, e-business focused basis, generating pull-through revenue separating P&L from value-add, streamlining the supply-chain of the bespoke legacy-icebergs of integration on a rolling go-live, go/no-go decisions notwithstanding, looking at the Ts and Cs, giving full consideration to the contracted schedules at the agreed rates and with change management in full-effect, propose a workaround solution, implement and test in an iterative cycle, borrowing from DSDM, SSADM, adopting PRINCE, GAYLORD, SPAM, EGGS, CHIPS and BEANZ methodologies, to forge a byword in industry-standard data-mapping principles, not foregoing the bleeding edge rollout of hub-centric, enterprise-wide solutions delivering seamless integration, incentivizing viral markets, reinventing customized architectures, leveraging real-time systems, whiteboarding 24/365 portals, empowering the clicks-and-mortar markets to incentivize cross-platform technologies. Oh, and giving 45p to the man behind the counter and in return recieving the latest lunatics' update."
I hope this conveys the true value of consultancy speak, but I'm sure we can all contribute (nearly typed "add value" there, but your probably not "incentivised" enough to care), if we think short and soft (is that the opposite to long and hard?) about it. So come on you human resources, get thinking, don't be a JUMBO (Just Up Mountain Behind Octupus - coherence optional).
BTW, incentivised is not a word, okay? |
|  | | | | | | RESEARCHER DATA
| |  | Name:
The Q
Last posted: Sep 20, 2000
| | | | | | Researcher Number:
36026
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