Some of the accolades handed out at legal IT ceremonies defy parody as organisers dream up ever-narrower niches in the hope of attracting sponsorship or just attention. I do not know if anyone has in fact received an award for being the “most innovative law firm information services manager in the West Midlands”, but his or her time will surely come.
We need some shorter, snappier terms to express approval and ones which, furthermore, broaden the lexicon. Some words have been dulled by overuse, and I have drawn attention before to the numbing effect of the polysyllabic triplets so beloved of marketing people. These give us phrases like “systematised, revolutionary and groundbreaking” or “exciting, defensible and intuitive”, where the words look as if they have been pulled at random from a cheat’s guide to Scrabble, and been arranged more for their rhythmic quality than for any real meaning.
It would be really cool if people used words like, well, “cool” which, paradoxically, would indicate warm feelings towards a company or product. And now Gartner, of all people, has done just that (I say “of all people” because I have always pictured Gartner as rather in need of lightening up; either I was wrong about that, or someone else thought so too and did something about it).
Gartner has just named four cool vendors, one of whom is outsourcing specialist Integreon (I do not know who the others are, which suggests that they are from other industries, or are coy about their prize, or were less quick off the mark with the press release about it than Integreon was). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
