The Low Quality Level of Infosys SAP Technical Papers

by Shaun Snapp on September 20, 2011

What This Article Covers

Can Infosys write worthwhile white papers?
Is Infosys spending very much one on their “collateral” development?
Why it may not be a good idea for InfoSys to continue to write white papers.

Background

I recently decided to review a white paper written by Infosys. This is the probably the third time I have read an Infosys white paper on SAP which I downloaded from the internet, and I have finally noticed a pattern. While Infosys picks good topics, their consultants simply can’t write. It’s also not as if they lack the ability to write in simply one dimension. They seem to lack the ability to write in all dimensions. This means, confusing grammar, lack of organization, confusing and circuitousness with steps, paragraphs not named correctly. It’s difficult for me to see if the consultants actually have the content down because writing and organization of their documents are so poor that the document directions are not reproducible. How could this have happened?

Investing in Collateral?

I suspect that Infosys may be cheap, although this is surely not a thunderbolt for anyone who works for them. The reason I say this is that Infosys tasks their consultants with writing the paper, but has no quality control on its papers. Infosys could hire a non-SAP professional writer the take the raw content of their consultants and reorganize the entire paper, but they don’t. They take a person who can’t write, the partner/director who has no idea what the paper says tries to read it, it looks good to him, and they then send it over to the graphics department to format it and save it to a PDF and then post it to the internet. The paper did not go through a technical review or a professional edit. Several of the PDFs I have read from Infosys have also come from the SAP SDN website, which means that SAP is performing no quality control on the papers that it allows to be placed there. The papers I have been unfortunate enough to find by Infosys have proven to be a major waste of my time. I just recently spent two hours trying to read eight pages of technical documentation. I found absolutely nothing in the paper that I could use.

Here were some of the obvious problems, but the problems are not limited to this list:

It is a simple 4 step process and he numbers them, step 1, step 2 and then what appears to be step 3 becomes “the next step.” We started with step numbering, and then I suppose the writer lazy? Is it too much work to number steps?
The paragraph headings have nothing to do with each other, and there is no logical flow of the steps and what they mean to the final result.
The document is not broken out in a way that makes it clear what the steps are and how they relate to each other. Part of putting together a document is not just the grammar, but the organization of the idea. For instance, paragraph headings of the different steps are useful.
The author transitions from the last step, and proceeds directly to how to troubleshoot the configuration but without breaking to say the build steps are now complete, and a new process has begun.
There are “tips” listed through the document, but no distinction between the tips and the main body of the document. This has the effect of a conversation with an Alzheimer’s patient, in that you never know when some random topic will come up to dilute the main topic being discussed.
The English itself is stilted as would be expected of a person for whom English is a second language, and who has received no guidance from a person who speaks English is a first language.

No professional editor would have allowed any of these errors, actually no reasonable good writer would have allowed these errors, which is why its easy to estimate who actually reviewed this paper. Infosys authors badly need an editor, because most the people who write for Infosys clearly have an only hazy knowledge of English, and without Microsoft Word correcting the basics, its unlikely Infosys could turn out grammatically correct or correctly spelled papers. It is really amazing arrogance on the part of Infosys directors/partners to think they can write and release a paper where not a single English as a first language person reviews or edits the document before it is published.

Is This Increasing Infosys’ Profile?

One can imagine some Infosys partner/director type rubbing their hands together in some dark room thinking about how much this will enhance Infosys’s profile. However, I don’t think it is accomplishing the objective they seek. What it highlights, which is something I did not know before these papers were published is how marginally literate (there are many forms of illiteracy, from complete illiteracy to alliteracy) many Infosys resources seem to be (at least in English, they may be perfectly literate in some other language). I also learned that Infosys is an amazing cheap company that is unconcerned with the quality of its output. So while publication may be increasing Infosys’ profile, I doubt it is doing so in the way I think the partners at Infosys want.For some reason my intuition is that Infosys will continue to publish extremely poor quality papers that fail in every category of technical writing until they receive some negative reinforcement. That is the point of this article you are reading. People that work in SAP require documentation that they can actually use, not quasi-literate un-reproducible white papers (which to be fair is the only documents InfoSys seems capable of generating) that are only intended to increase a company’s profile. If your internal resources cannot write, then hire someone into your organization or hire a contractor who can work with your technical resources to produce documents.

Can Infosys Afford This Higher Quality Approach?

Yes they can. Infosys makes quite a bit of money based upon the discrepancy between what they pay their resources and what they bill companies for their resources. Instead of showering all this money on the partners and directors so they can buy boats, they could put the money to use in creating things that have some quality. They should have ample money to provide some employment to people who know how to write English and how to organize thoughts into a coherent product.

As for me, I have probably read my last Infosys paper.

Conclusion

I have left the individual paper out of this post to avoid embarrassing the author. I see this as less the fault of the author, who probably was pushed into writing the paper by a director/partner at Infosys, than the fault of the culture of poor quality control and greed of the partners at Infosys. One author may not know how to write, however, in order for a PDF/white paper of this quality to actually be published outside of the company, that company has to be clueless on multiple levels.

Simply put, Infosys should either stop writing white papers or hire resources who can write to support their white paper initiatives. Its simple. Either produce something of quality, or don’t waste people’s time by clogging up the internet with badly written and illogical papers.

Share