IT needs to make itself understood

Not long ago, a PR representing a major IT supplier rang Computing and breathlessly informed us that his client had issued a press release about a customer who had ‘moved from Das to a San using Cas for its Pacs’.

If you are a dedicated storage expert then maybe, just maybe, that sentence might make some sense to you.

More recently, we were informed by another organisation that its mission was to ‘promote bi-directional knowledge transfer’. Or ‘talking’, as it is otherwise known.

So it came as no surprise to see the results of a survey by recruitment consultancy Computer People this week revealing that 67 per cent of office workers feel bewildered by the jargon used by their colleagues in the IT department.

How often has this all too valid accusation been made? You would have thought that IT people would have learned by now.

As technology becomes increasingly pervasive in everyday life and the workplace, everyone in IT has a responsibility to make users comfortable with what they are doing. This means talking their language, not some impenetrable acronym-filled jargon.

It is also a matter of survival; is it any wonder that companies outsource their IT provision if their own IT team struggle to make themselves understood?

At a time when the industry has major challenges to face with recruitment, skills development and diversity, it is unhelpful to see these negative stereotypes of the IT profession persist.

Once, the jargon was a badge of honour, a means of self-protection that made the IT department ‘special’. Those days are gone. Senior business executives are IT-savvy enough to ignore the technicalities and expect solutions to business problems expressed in business terms.

IT will always be complex and technical. But the successful IT leaders will be those who can hide that by their ability to communicate the benefits of technology in simple, easy-to-understand, business language.