I would have loved to have had something like that when I was looking for my first job in Manhattan as a developer during the Boom.
Before I caught on that the acronyms being thrown at me during interviews were as much to test my ability to BS with the interviewers than to provide any real useful analysis on the spot, I took my failings at understanding them very hard.
Being clueless, I would slink home and look up my vocabulary holes on the web--ERP, ERM, PLM. What the hell were they talking about? All the definitions I found, beyond the literal meaning to the acronyms, seemed self-referential and had no meaning to me without a contextual detailed example.
But somewhere along the line, while working inside some organization, you hear the term enough that suddenly you find yourself using it too, to other people, and they somehow know what it means, even though providing anything beyond a literal definition is still hard.
Instead of glossary, I would have prefered some sort of Richard Scary type cartoon chart, the ones with the cutaway view of houses and fire stations. Something like that---a concrete example of what ERP is supposed to mean inside an organization proabably would have let me see exactly what it was supposed to mean. Not one of the those phony corporate charts, but one made by someone who has read and understood (at least partially) Tufte.
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I would have loved to have had something like that when I was looking for my first job in Manhattan as a developer during the Boom.
Before I caught on that the acronyms being thrown at me during interviews were as much to test my ability to BS with the interviewers than to provide any real useful analysis on the spot, I took my failings at understanding them very hard.
Being clueless, I would slink home and look up my vocabulary holes on the web--ERP, ERM, PLM. What the hell were they talking about? All the definitions I found, beyond the literal meaning to the acronyms, seemed self-referential and had no meaning to me without a contextual detailed example.
But somewhere along the line, while working inside some organization, you hear the term enough that suddenly you find yourself using it too, to other people, and they somehow know what it means, even though providing anything beyond a literal definition is still hard.
Instead of glossary, I would have prefered some sort of Richard Scary type cartoon chart, the ones with the cutaway view of houses and fire stations. Something like that---a concrete example of what ERP is supposed to mean inside an organization proabably would have let me see exactly what it was supposed to mean. Not one of the those phony corporate charts, but one made by someone who has read and understood (at least partially) Tufte.