Management buzzword of the nonce: "high-touch delivery"

[tangaroa]

Via a recent job ad, companies are starting to demand "high-touch delivery". Maybe they want to hire Bob Filner. I hear he's looking for a job, and he could use some work too. These guys trace the term back to John Naisbit's 1982 book Megatrends, and more recently it was in the title of Naisbit's 1999 book High Tech / High Touch so it's all his fault. The term seems to have gained currency in hospital patient care where it makes some kind of sense and then within the past couple of years infected Cisco in some sort of top-down fashion with documentation and job descriptions rewritten to include the term "high-touch" as if people were ordered to say it. So Cisco's physical hardware products now offer "high-touch" capability, and we know that the the people who wrote the job ad got their Cisco training very recently.

The job ad is even more snarkworthy. They want the guy who built the server room and wrote the IP stack for a help desk position. In this economy, they'll probably find several candidates.