Just three words…

 

///beam.dish.sushi

///this.fantastic.notes

///absolutely.clueless.answer

Probably one of the most rapidly adopted ‘new’ technology solutions of the last few years (with the exception of Covid related deployments) has been the ‘What 3 Words’ platform – a project dividing the world into 3m x 3m grid spaces and assigning a unique character string to each location. I have no doubt that despite appearing a ridiculously simple idea on its surface (hence the rapid adoption of it), there were many years of project planning, testing, implementation and revision before the product we know and use today went public.

With the right governance over planning, testing and implementation, every technology implementation should succeed to deliver its goals as (in my opinion) ‘What 3 Words’ has and continues to do very successfully – my Scout group regularly uses it to confirm meeting or hike locations due to its simplicity to understand. And that is the key of a successful implementation – the underlying technology can be extremely adept at performing its allocated tasks and faultlessly resilient BUT if the user interface or user process is too complex / unnatural to use, the implementation will likely fail. Ultimately it is still the human interface of any project that will decide the fate of an implementation.

Living within the world of document management, I am surrounded by three word initialisms* – ECM (Enterprise Content Management), DMS (Document Management System), BPM (Business Process Management), BPA (Business Process Automation), OCR (Optical Character Recognition), ICR, CMS, RPA, ERM… So of course I looked up a couple:

 

///document.management.system – in the East China Sea, off the west coast of Japan’s Kyushu Island

///enterprise.content.management – in the Atlantic Ocean, to the east of the Falkland Islands

///business.process.management – deep in the Philippine Sea

///business.process.automation – just off the coast of Canada’s northwest territories (so close to landfall!!!)

///optical.character.recognition – (dry land!!!) Just east of the Blackfeet Indian reservation, Montana, USA.

Of course, no implementation is perfect and even ‘What 3 Words’ no doubt has its issues, the most obvious being the unfortunate combination of dictionary words for some locations. For example:

If you are on Twitter (as are PacSol) and as long as you accept the risk that some of these are NSFW (not suitable for work), perhaps follow What 3 rude Words for more examples of when a great idea goes a little ‘wrong’!

*Yes if you search on Google they will be listed as acronyms by most sites but let us enlighten you…

• Initialisms are abbreviations that are pronounced one letter at a time.
• Acronyms are abbreviations that are pronounced as words.

We do try to educate as well as entertain!

Toby Gilbertson, Customer Services Manager. February 2022.

#PacSolUK #what3words #projectmanagement #ECM #DMS #BPA #BPM