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In a few words: why IT is so intimidating

By September 9, 2015April 20th, 2022One Comment4 min read

As a project manager and software metrics expert, I’ve learned that simplicity and clarity are the keys to effective communication.  Consider that when we meet someone from another country, we use simple words, phrases and paraphrasing to communicate our meaning. Most of us would consider it rude and intimidating to talk to a foreigner using complex English and idioms.

Yet, that’s exactly what happens when we, software professionals, talk to … well almost anyone but ourselves.  We are technical professionals with access to reams of data, and you might think the idea of simplicity and clarity would be common sense.  Sadly, it’s quite the opposite.  Like medicine, engineering, and other technical professions, we seem to take pride in creating acronyms and continually redefining the English language to suit our purpose.  Then, we scoff at anyone who doesn’t understand, and expect them to bone up on their vocabulary.

It really only takes a few obscure words to intimidate someone, in IT we can do it with one or two (such as “artifact” or “construct” or “provisioning.”)

I’ve seen it for decades – instead of using common English words (with known definitions) or inventing brand new terms, the software industry tends to complicate things by using words that are already known, and changing the definitions.

I noticed this trend in my first post-college job when someone in my department (pipeline engineering) set me up to use the mainframe computer.  As luck would have it, my system crashed on the first day and I had to call computer services.  When asked for my “terminal address” the group howled when I said “the fourth floor” when obviously they had referred to the 16 digit serial number on the right side of my computer monitor.  When I took a job working in that same technical group months later, I had to learn a whole new vocabulary.  Instead of talking about documents or papers or manuals, my co-workers talked about “deliverables” which also included hardware and software among other things.

I learned that DASD and TCPIP were words in themselves used to mean specific things but few could remember what were the words that made up the acronym.  As confused as I was as a graduate engineer with programming experience, I wondered how much more confused our customers must be.

Then along came new SDLC’s (software development “life cycles”), new methodologies (approaches and guidelines for developing software), and new concepts such as object-oriented programming. Each new wave washed ashore with a mixture of new, re-defined and sometimes arcane terms with very specific meanings. Sometimes the “common English usage” definition prevailed, other times the term had an entirely new definition.

Take the word “artifact” for example.  The first definition is the way that it is defined in common English usage (Google.com) and the latter is specific to IT.

artifact

artifact it

 

 

 

So, now instead of saying document or manual or deliverables in general conversation and in meetings, artifact was used.  Ugh…. customers shrugged, IT didn’t notice the misunderstanding.  Business chugged on with an ever widening communication gap, and projects missed their targets.

Today things are beyond mere terminology changes.  We’ve even started banning certain words we don’t think fit our purpose – in spite that a term is well-understood.  For example, I recently read a post that proposed banning the word “project” from the vocabulary and replacing it with “initiative” to redirect professionals to focus on product delivery instead of start and end date.  It’s a great idea to focus on product delivery and getting all the teams on board to focus on output, but terminology is already a fundamental divisive issue. Ugh.

All in all, I believe that one of the biggest chasms in software development today lies in communication between technical professionals and the business.  We’re really two different cultures (more about that in another post) and the use of simple, common English terms (with standard definitions) could bridge some of the gap.

As the title says:  In just a few words… IT is intimidating.

What do you think?

Have a great week!

Carol