Message Not Received. Simon Phil

up and running in 30 days or less across a variety of cloud and dedicated architectures.10

      There’s more to this press release, but let’s stop right here.

      Does that 61-word, one-sentence monstrosity make any sense at all to you? If your mind started wandering halfway through, don’t fret. I’m in the same boat. After all, the jargon-laden monsoon contains Big Data, platform, open source, infrastructure, cloud, and architectures. Honorable mention goes to next-generation, solutions, and deployment. And let’s not forget CSC’s pièce de résistance: the horribly constructed acronym BDPaaS. Cramming all of these oft-bastardized technology terms into a single sentence is quite the semantic achievement. The word cacophony comes to mind.

      Before you continue reading, take a deep breath. It’s about to get worse – much worse.

      There. You’ve been warned.

      CSC’s press release continues with a tsunami of dense sentences and awkward jargon:

      The CSC BDPaaS has been engineered to support an “as-a-Service” on several cloud infrastructures including Amazon, CSC Cloud Solutions, RedHat OpenStack and VMware VSphere private clouds. This allows flexible deployment models within the customer’s datacenter as well as trusted third party datacenters including CSC’s. With the CSC BDPaaS, CSC customers are also able to leverage the ServiceMesh Agility Platform^TM, which provides cloud management, governance, and security across public, private and hybrid clouds.

      CSC BDPaaS offers batch analytics, fine-grained and interactive analytics, and real-time streaming analytics. Along with a suite of improved next-generation reference architectures for IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Teradata, it is the only “as a service” offering that seamlessly integrates with Hadoop, Ad-Hoc Query and Streaming analytics to support high volumes, high velocities and any type of data.

      “CSC is uniquely positioned to support predictive and prescriptive analytics for actionable insights from internal and external data to better manage customer intelligence, product innovation, risks and operational efficiencies,” said Jim Kaskade, vice president and general manager, Big Data & Analytics, CSC. “Clients can minimize up-front costs and leverage existing technology investments without sacrificing time-to-market mandates. We’re helping clients unlock the power and potential of Big Data with greater speed, efficiency, and confidence.”

      Full disclosure: I have no axe to grind here, but I cannot claim to be a completely uninterested party with respect to CSC. For nearly two years in the mid-2000s, I worked for the company. I implemented enterprise applications for its healthcare clients.

      I have spent the duration of my professional career (nearly 20 years as of this point) at the nexus of business, technology, and data. As such, I am very familiar with most of the individual terms in the CSC press release, and I still don’t fully understand what this new product allegedly does.

      This begs the question, what was CSC thinking here? Admittedly, some of the terms in the press release are gaining in popularity. By no means, though, has every chief executive heard of cloud computing, Big Data, and Hadoop, never mind gems like improved next-generation reference architectures. Why toss them into one big tech bouillabaisse?

      At the risk of piling on, it wouldn’t be a proper technology press release if CSC didn’t mention how it was “uniquely positioned” to do exactly what it purports to do. I challenge you to find a similar announcement these days that does not contain this two-word staple. (As an aside, I believe that word unique is a superlative. Something can’t be very unique, rather unique, or really unique. A person or thing is either unique or it isn’t. Period. Not every linguist shares this view, as Ammon Shea points out in Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation.)

Lessons Learned

      Comparing and contrasting the miscommunications of multibillion-dollar tech companies like Microsoft and CSC can teach us a great deal. The two messages exhibit both significant similarities and differences. Let’s first address the latter.

      The primary intended audience for each message is very different. Nadella wrote his memo mainly for Microsoft’s current – and soon to be former – employees, although he’s very mindful that it’s impossible to keep messages like these private today. Chief executives carefully craft these communications with full knowledge that they will end up on the Web for all to read, often minutes afterward. Microsoft’s primary goal surely wasn’t publicity.

      By contrast, CSC made its announcement chiefly to the outside world (hence the formal press release). BDPaaS is anything but a $1.99 iOS app or game; even the company’s wealthiest executives aren’t about to purchase its new product for their own personal use. Business is war, and companies are engaged in the same arms race for customers and profits. At a high level, CSC’s marketing and PR strategies could have taken one of two forms: simplicity or complexity. The company clearly doubled down on the latter. It is betting that its best chance for victory comes from creating and promulgating the most arcane, intricate-sounding terms possible. Ideally, from CSC’s standpoint, current and prospective clients will do the following after reading its press release:

      ● Get really excited and/or intrigued.

      ● Click on a few links to learn more about BDPaaS.

      ● Call a sales rep.

      ● Schedule an in-person demo.

      ● Sit in amazement at what BDPaaS can do.

      ● Ask for pricing information.

      ● Eventually write a big check.

      Was complexity the right bet? It’s too early to say, but BDPaaS hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm. Several times over the course of researching and writing this book (most recently on December 6, 2014), I searched Google for “CSC BDPaaS customers” and “CSC BDPaaS case studies.” Beyond retreads of its press release, I retrieved zero meaningful results. What’s more, the company’s dedicated product Web page lacked a single BDPaaS success story.11 I would wager that CSC would have seen far greater success in announcing its new service if it had chosen a simpler, more coherent path.

      Let’s now turn to the significant parallels between these two companies’ messages. First, announcements like these are well-coordinated events. They represent the antitheses of an employee’s ill-advised, alcohol-induced, and stream-of-consciousness tweets. (Chapter 1 begins by introducing Justine Sacco, the current queen of the dumb random tweet.) I assure you that Nadella didn’t pen his memo late at night and hit the send button by his lonesome. Other high-ranking Microsoft employees developed it with or even for him. Ultimately, everyone involved signed off on its language.

      By the same token, more than a handful of CSC’s nearly 80,000 employees work in its public relations department. If CSC outsourced the BDPaaS release, it’s highly unlikely that its PR firm operated with carte blanche. For such a critical corporate announcement, a team of people provides input. There are usually arguments over versions, terms, content, length, and even the specific words used. I have no doubt that some of CSC’s most senior executives at the company ultimately signed off on its unfortunate press release. At best, the BDPaaS announcement is unclear; at worst, it’s downright bewildering and counterproductive.

      Second, consider the result of each message. Both fail despite the meticulous planning, editing, and consensus-building that happened behind the scenes. Because each message employed nearly impenetrable language, it’s unlikely that either was fully received. A simpler, more straightforward approach would have been far more effective in each case. Less would have been more. Put differently, the problem isn’t what Microsoft and CSC announced; it’s how each company announced it.

      Third, and most germane to this book, these messages are anything but isolated occurrences. Far from it. Lamentably, similar communications have become commonplace in many professional settings, and not only from some of the biggest technology vendors. Increasingly, confusing messages seem to be becoming the norm in the business world. Referring

10

“CSC Launches Next-Generation Big Data Platform as a Service,” June 26, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/otcfxq8.

11

See http://tinyurl.com/mfvxbfc.