[omginternets]

Who is involved in what tends to be very high on the list of important parameters.

To your point, though, you'd of course tailor this to your audience. For example: you might say "marketing" or "the engineering team" instead of "Tom, Dick and Harry".

[bavila]

Agreed. I think your counterpart is too focused on the person's _name_ rather than the contextual _role_ that the person occupies.

If someone is coming to me with a question, it is extremely helpful to know up front who they are (with respect to their role, not so much their name) in order to immediately start narrowing down the relevant contextual parameters that will be framing my understanding of their problem and my response. I don't want to read a wall of text while thinking of how to respond from an engineering perspective, only to discover at the end that the person lacks technical aptitude.

[WalterBright]

If you're a celebrity your audience has heard of, yes. Otherwise, no.