We have all read them at one point or another. That 6 page document that is meant to explain everything about how wonderful things will be in the future of project X or Y. The next stage of reading a few is to try and translate them based on examples of application of technologies to reach the lofty (and often wordy) goals. Then to see if there are common applications / technologies … and use this to formulate a generic vision document.
I mist also dig out BullFighter again. It is a little add-on to Office 2000 / XP that will check your documents against a dictionary of certain words that I tend to call ‘Manglement speak’. It can be very enlightening. Unfortunately it has not been kept going for Office 2003 or 2007.
My colleague (the illustrious Mr Ford) has dug out a multitude of possible resources over the last week whilst I have been digging out schools or contacts. I would point people at http://future.ncsl.org.uk/ (thank you Mr Ford) as well as http://emergingtechnologies.becta.org.uk/
More later … must go and update my other blog (talking about sharepoint).