How to write a white paper

Because I’ve been receiv­ing a lot of last-minute requests for help on the IS 6100 Paper 3 assign­ment, Gmail popped up a paid link about how to write a white paper. It’s a good post to read, because IS stu­dents often find and read white papers as they do their assign­ments. I’ve seen IS 7010 stu­dents ref­er­ence white papers in their case analy­sis assign­ments, too.

Of course, the IS 6100 Paper 3 assign­ment was not writ­ing a white paper. That assign­ment does require some out­side research, how­ever. As I men­tioned for my IS 6100 stu­dents on April 3, there are many good sources that could be used for busi­ness and aca­d­e­mic research. I’ve listed some in the “Find­ing ref­er­ences” link on the top menu of this site.

White papers, at least in infor­ma­tion sys­tems prac­tice, have lim­ited util­ity, as many IS and IT white papers are writ­ten to con­vince a poten­tial client or cus­tomer to con­sider a par­tic­u­lar vendor’s solu­tion. In some white papers, there’s no real attempt to pro­vide a lit­er­a­ture review of reli­able sources. I’ve read IS and IT white papers that read like the unex­pur­gated long ver­sion of a print advertisement.

Any white paper that’s cited as a source in a stu­dent paper needs some crit­i­cal analy­sis. Don’t just take the vendor’s word that their ser­vice, prod­uct or solu­tion is “the best”. Look at some reli­able ref­er­ences, too.

Tagged as: research