Incredible New Communications Tool Released: Plain English

If you were like me, you were probably left speechless by the commercial, it was so incomprehensible. That commercial may not have been responsible for the demise of Wang Laboratories, but I'll bet it helped hasten that event.

Fast-forward some two decades and the problem persists: IT specialists have trouble communicating clearly to their customers. Whether it's justifying a hardware or software purchase, explaining why something failed, letting users know why a service will be taken offline, or simply telling someone what a particular piece of technology does, the pros who know the inner workings still leave the people they serve speechless -- at some cost to the effectiveness of the organization's IT operation.

At least, that's the impression I got from some commentaries I recently ran across. One was directed to IT professionals in higher education and pled with them to focus on effectively conveying the information their customers -- students and faculty -- needed to know "in plain English, please." The other made the same point, but was directed to corporate IT professionals; it advised them that too much geekspeak and too little business talk may explain why the corporate brass keep cutting their IT budgets.

Now, given that these items are from way back in the Dark Ages - two and three years ago, respectively - one might think that the problem has been resolved and that IT people understand the value of plain English. Maybe not, if a tale a friend of mine who is an IT consultant in business for himself is any guide.

One of his customers' mail servers had crashed and the customer wanted to know why. "What kind of car do you drive?" my friend asked, and the customer told him. "For what you paid for that car, you could have brought five servers for your office. Instead, you're running your email program on a server that's five years old and not built for the volume of traffic you get. That's why it failed."

When was the last time you used vivid comparisons like that to make your point? Effective communication in everyday English can help clients and customers understand better just what their computers and software are supposed to do and why they should make certain technology investments. In fact, I would go so far as to say that instead of hiring everyone based on their knowledge of the inner workings of the hardware and technology, IT departments should have on their staff at least one person whose strength is in written and spoken English and has a grasp of the technology. I can think of at least one person who fits that description quite well.

By: Sandy Smith