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It's a side effect of inter-department competition, as far as I can tell. IT was insecure in the corporate space for a few decades (despite it being as fundamental to most companies as, say, the finance department) and many people fell into the trap of making it sound harder than it is in order to insure some job security.

The funny thing is, you don't need to make it sound harder than it is by making up confusing buzzwords, it's already pretty hard!. Especially in the enterprise space.

Imagine if the logistics department, or the aforementioned finance department decided to rebrand their standard practices every few years. It would cause ridiculous levels of confusion amongst the older workers, as they'd assume they needed complete retraining in this new thing. In reality, they probably just need, at maximum, a refresher course to bring their skills up to date with the newer procedures.

If you ever find yourself describing your latest project to a non-IT-savvy friend or relative, then you quickly realise that the buzzwords and branding are unnecessary to get the concept across. The resulting description, unfortunately, can be pretty boring. The other purpose of buzzwords is to make stuff sound much more exciting than it really is...




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