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I've been using SME for Subject Matter Expert since the late 1990s. I'm not going to go to the garage and see if I've still got my HR textbooks from that period, but personally I don't get "Small-medium enterprises" as a concept or an acronym - the whole thing is a buzzword that is meaningless, and then to co-opt a well established, very specific, acronym for it is just bollocks.
stevep-
I was also an Small Medium Enterprise in major crime, missing person and counter terrorist search from the late 90s.
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I don't get "Small-medium enterprises" as a concept or an acronym - the whole thing is a buzzword that is meaningless
It is fair from meaningless. It's most commonly applied in relation to state benefits (e.g. various forms of tax reliefs or incentives). As you'd expect they make up the majority of business and are critical to growth and employment. In a sense, for the most part you are defining them in opposition to fuck-off massive companies who can easily obtain debt, investment, and have economies of scale to avoid tax so don't need specific relief.
Maybe NFOMC instead?
My beef with it is as often pointed out, it can be shortened to expert. Particularly as you almost always say something like; "stevep is the SME for 1990s HR text books" or "who is our SME on buzzwords?". So there is almost never a time when person or expert couldn't be used.
Plus Small Medium sized Enterprises is a term used across the largest institutions in the world - eg from wiki "World Bank, the OECD, European Union, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization".
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There's an actual legal definition of small-medium enterprises. You can't get much more specific.
Lots of options for support, or lighter regulatory requirements, depend on being an SME.
Constable_Savage
hugo7
aggi
SME - turns out people aren't talking about small-medium enterprises but subject matter experts.
Fuck knows why people have tried to co-opt such a well-established acronym. Also, it just seems to get used when expert would be perfectly sufficient, no-one is thinking that the expert being brought in has an expertise in a totally different area.