Disaster fighter nixes "solutions"

Posted by: Stephen Baker on January 29

Dr. Eric Rasmussen is one of the people who will be spending Google’s millions to battle disasters. But he tells Helen Walters that he has banned the word “solution” in his offices.

“I used to be Fleet Surgeon [in the Navy] and people from commercial companies would bring me very expensive solutions. And they were the solutions they happened to own,” he told me. “So I took people out at sea and said: ‘Put your solution in this context. Now how sensible is what you brought me?”

I brought up that hated word in an article back in 2003. I tried it in a bit of dialogue:

JARGON. "If you could spare a second, I'd like to tell you about an innovative suite of Java-enabled Web-service solutions."

"You don't say."

"It's customized for the SME sector. Plugs seamlessly right into your ERP backbone. Architecture-agnostic. Backward-compatible. So your legacy doesn't come up and bite you."

"That could hurt."

"I'll say. And what about your front end?"

"You tell me."

"We have an open-source CRM platform. We've Web-enabled it, and it's massively scalable. We've got a beta running on mobile clients. Should be ready for 3G, two-point-five G, or 802.11b solutions by the end of Q4'03. Worst case: Q1'04.

"Hmmm."

"You're probably wondering about price points...."

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/