Does anyone really read any of the white papers churned out by IT suppliers? I don’t want to sound flippant because I know that there are some great publications produced by some organisations, but generally the quality is dire.

Let’s face it, the role of most commercially-oriented (as opposed to academic) white papers is either to function as a marketing device – bits of paper to hand out at conferences – or as an ego boost to the consultants who write them.

I just received two white papers by email from one of the major international IT suppliers - take a look at a quote from one of them:

“Many IT organisations have a metrics handbook that suggests the set of metrics to be followed. If such a handbook prescribes a set of mandatory metrics, I would like such metrics to be rather small in number. A larger set of metrics can remain optional, leaving it to the discretion of the project. Now the question is - how can one decide what would be the right metric. It is the question of finding the right metric first before getting the metric right; the irony that comes out of Joseph Juran’s adage do right things before doing things right.”

Excuse me? Now, a paper on improving software quality is never going to be a gripping read, but it should be possible to read it without thinking you just wandered into one of the drug-taking sequences in a Hunter S. Thompson novel.

So what’s the answer? In my view it’s staring the IT companies in the face, the humble blog. If those consultants really are as smart as they claim then they should be able to produce short, regular comment that is far more interesting and useful than the dirge they presently produce. These are supposed to be IT companies, so how come they seem wedded to the idea of supporting the printing press forever more?