Couldn’t agree more with the relative importance of strategy and tactics.

It usually causes a raised eyebrow when I tell people that at Freeform Dynamics we specialise in tactical research studies aimed at helping people with activity in current/next budget cycle.

That’s where most people need most help though – both buyers/uers and sellers or IT.

I’d become so used to the abuse of the word “solution” that I was actually surprised when I discovered that its actual meaning excluded any kind of product. I believed that the meaning of the word was being bent rather than being invented.
Strategic and tactical, I agree, are also much abused words. And here’s a thing: often both are regarded as good but “strategic” is somehow regarded as better than “tactical”. In practice, in war and games like chess, where the words apply directly, it is tactics that normally triumph over strategy.

While I, like most others, slip into using the S word freely, I have an issue with it in that it perpetuates the myth that IT requirements can be thought of as a series of discrete problems. Jon, myself, and the two Neils tried to tackle this “buy something, implement it, job done” mindset when we wrote the Technology Garden book, the premise being that just like gardening, doing IT requires attention to be paid to interactions and dependencies. The other similarity is that also like gardening, doing IT is not something you can ever ‘finish’.

The implication is that we need to consider the macro level stuff a bit more than we necessarily do at the moment. By this I mean direction, governance, architecture (in the true sense) and so on.

Returning to the question of vocabulary, another couple of words I find myself using a lot are ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’. While I was designing a research questionnaire a few weeks ago, though, a reviewer pointed out that what I really meant by these in the context I was working in at the time was ‘critical’ and ‘non-critical’.