Crispness

Ah, the magic of a crisp phrase. Like this one: Decision Support System.

Decision Support System. Who couldn't use something like that? It even sounds sexy, powerful, perhaps a bit mysterious. Decision - hard, crisp, no-nonsense. Support -? don'?t got to do it all myself, darn it; this thing is going to support me, take the load off me so I can focus on the key things, the important things, leave the clutter and the scutwork for the product to handle. And System - woh, now that sounds good, its not just a product, it'?s a System, all shiny and gleaming, sitting there by my right elbow, chuffing quietly, waiting for the word to leap into action.

You can tell I read management magazines, can'?t you? This one came (liberally altered) from an article in a magazine that'?s aimed at the managers of health organizations, but you can find the same kind of thing in CIO magazine, in the Harvard Business Review, and a myriad of other places. That'?s because the managers of organizations are just like you and me -? they'?re looking for the magic bullet, the tool that will take away at least some (they want ALL, they'll settle for SOME) of their problems, so that they can focus on the Things That Matter, the Important Things. Not all of them are like that, though. Some understand that no tool can do it for you; further, that the more complex the tool, the more likely it won'?t work the way you want it to work. It'?ll do things that you want to do, but you'?ll do a lot more adapting to the tool than the tool will be adapted to you,? regardless of what the vendor says. I suspect that'?s true not only of any complex piece of software, but any complex piece of anything -things are designed with straight lines and right angles, written precisely and in measured cadence. People don'?t operate that way -? they curve in and out and around, they are vague and contradictory, they move to lots of different beats. It'?s a bold piece of software -?or anything - that can hope to match up in any substantial way to the needs and desires (both known and unknown, voiced and unvoiced) of the average person, the average group, the average company. The best consumers learn to be very, very precise in what they want, segmenting that into what they absolutely must have, what they would really like to have, what would be nice to have, what they would like but won't pay for. And yes, since people are involved, thereÂ?s overlap there.

But crispness sells. Decision. Support. System. Hot damn, I'?ll take two.