Somerset County
Council has formally recorded as one of its business challenges
the task of understanding the use of jargon and acronyms by IBM,
its partner on a £400m outsourcing contract.
In September 2007, the county council, Taunton Deane Borough
Council and Avon and Somerset Constabulary formed with IBM
a joint venture company, SouthWest One. IBM is the majority
shareholder.
Now the county council's Audit and Resources sub-committee has
published a paper on early successes of the joint venture and the
challenges facing the authority in monitoring SouthWest One.
One of the challenges is listed as: "Plain English - our new
partner has a challenge to consider in reducing jargon and
explaining acronyms which are in common use within IBM."
No specifics are mentioned but IBM's association with jargon and
acronyms dates back decades. There is a dictionary of "IBM Jargon
and General Computing" which is in its 10th edition, issued from
IBM UK Laboratories in Hampshire. Many of the definitions are
technical, but not all. A "stretch target" is defined as a "goal
that probably is impossible" as in: "We're setting stretch targets
next year".
Members of a council's audit committee could find it hard to
grasp quickly some of the language used in IBM's literature.
For example IBM's online publication "Infrastructure
considerations for service-oriented architecture" warns that SOA
adoption introduces new and unforeseen challenges with security
integration, including "...multiple security credentials, such as
Kerberos, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)", the "Web
services security and Resource Access Control Facility (RACF)", and
"multiple protocols, including SOAP, HTTP, HTTP over the Secure
Sockets Layer (HTTPS), Java Message Service (JMS) and Message
Queuing (MQ)".
IBM employees are said to have a language of their own.
However Somerset County Council has far more praise for IBM than
criticism. It says of the ethos of staff at IBM and its
subcontractor Mouchel
Parkman that they are "always attentive and enthusiastic and
have a 'Can Do' attitude taking personal responsibility for
resolving issues and urgent service requests".
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