By Steve Ranger, 7 August 2008 10:40
COMMENT
We've got a long list of forbidden words here at silicon.com.
Words that, should they appear in a reporter's copy, will result in that unlucky scribe taking responsibility for making tea for the team until they have learned their lesson.
And we drink a lot of tea.
At the top of the list of forbidden words is the big daddy of lazy marketing terms: "solution".
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Unless it's a reference to a homogeneous mixture composed of two or more substances (thanks Wikipedia!) or a Dutch progressive rock band (Wikipedia again), then it's pretty much banned from the publication.
After all, surely I'm not the only one to wince when an otherwise right-minded tech exec explains their 'solution' (especially if it's an 'end-to-end' solution, which scores double points).
I mention this not simply as a warning to the marketing people out there, but also because the use of language is something close to the heart of an excellent column I read this week by our resident Naked CIO.
The subject was the way managers bend and abuse language to hide their own failings - but what really struck me was the comments about a phrase that I had taken to be quite innocuous: 'the business'.
Or as the column puts it: "I also hate the use of 'the business' to mean an opposing force that only exists to complicate the world of IT."
It seems the Naked CIO isn't alone in thinking this, and one of the reader comments puts it eloquently: "I've hated the phrase 'the business' since my first day as a trainee, because I thought I had joined my company to be part of the business, not some spotty little sibling that the big kids are embarrassed to be seen with."
Do other parts of organisations suffer the same angst? Do the marketing people worry about the relationship between marketing and "the business"? I doubt it. Is there a tortured relationship between sales and "the business"? I think not.
So why has the IT department defined itself as the opposite of the business it is meant to be part of? Or is it the rest of the business that has defined the IT organisation as something alien?
There's plenty of pub-psychology we could apply here.
Is it that 'the business' is afraid of how the IT brain-boxes could shake up their comfortable traditions? It is that the IT department doesn't want to soil its hands with the dirty work of commerce?
There's not an easy answer to this one - but I think it's an issue that is holding the IT organisation back, relegating it to the role of "spotty little sibling" that was mentioned above.
Business and IT shouldn't be separate islands, connected by decaying footbridge that is rarely travelled.
So get out there and build the bridges, and keep building bridges until the gap between the two currently separate islands is totally paved over, and you can't see where one ends and the next one begins.
A bit like Stockholm, really.
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