Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Worse than Failure

I love reading The Daily WTF. It's got a collection of IT-related mishaps and misadventures, and it's updated all the time. Recently, others have noticed it's popularity and have tried to cash in by mimicking the format. There have been some hits and some misses, but Informationweek missed the mark by such a margin, that I'd call it a "WTF" on it's own.

Take this example from the "Our Biggest Mistake" (in the printed version, the 'K' is backwards - Wacky!):

Communication Breakdown

"THE PRIMARY EXTERNAL IMPLEMENTATION TEAM
on our unified communications system project lost management control of one of the key subcontractors, causing confusion, communications breakdowns, and responses to our internal customer that weren't in line with our technology team's customer service goals. The key lesson from this would be to place tight controls on the outsourced project management team that meets[sic] with your desired service levels"


Totally hilarious, as well as informative. Good job Information Week. Awesome "Anecdote from InformationWeek 500 companies" about how a contractor got out of line. The only humour comes from the fact that you've managed to include a parallel construction grammatical mistake in an unfunny business tale and translate it into management speak not worthy of one of Raymond Chen's posts on the subject.

3 comments:

  1. oh g-d, that's terrible. Informationweek has jumped the shark (or nuked the fridge)

    ReplyDelete
  2. they're trying too hard

    ReplyDelete