Language is a wonderful thing. It allows people to talk to each other and communicate. Words help us to share ideas, concepts, theories, problems, solutions-powerful things, words.
And yet, they’re not always the amazing incredible tools that we want them to be. Why? Sometimes words lose some of their potency between being uttered by one person and received by another. Even though those words are in the same language, they lose something of their meaning in the process of being sent from one person to the next. When this happens, we often say the people involved aren’t "on the same wavelength".
Why do I bring this up? It arises from a chat I had recently with a representative at one IT vendor who told me the nature of the conversation with customers had changed, arguing that because they were more solution focused and about the business, they were taking place at a much higher level than if they had been plain old technology discussions.
I get what he’s saying; with so much concentration on cost and return on investment, the focus has shifted. Many companies are starting to ask about the value of technology to their business and what role it can play in addressing a business requirement rather than concentrating on how technology can be used to address a technological need. While someone in IT might grasp how or why a particular type of technology could address an IT requirement in an organisation, the involvement of finance and other departments in more and more discussions around IT purchasing puts the onus on technology being able to address a business need.
Simply put, it’s no good doing something merely to make your IT systems run better if they don’t deliver better performance for the business.
Now, this leads me to ask what kinds of people should IT vendors and channel partners be deploying to talk to their customers. If they continue to try to maintain the conversations they previously had, with a language toned and fine-tuned for the IT department, they could get a terrible shock when they come to speak to people from other parts of the business. While the words they used might be recognised as being from the same language, they would be deployed in such a way as to become almost incomprehensible.
So should IT vendors start to train their people and their partners’ people to talk a different language from that used in the IT, or at least to use a different dialect that would be easier for other parts of the customer’s business to understand? Of course they should but I don’t think it’s quite as easy as it sounds. The IT industry has got where it has today by bending and shaping language to fit its purpose. To a large extent, it has also succeeded in forcing customers to speak the same language when it comes to conversations around technology. It’s helped that those conversations have usually been held with people within organisations that are native IT language speakers themselves.
Up until now, the rest of the business hasn’t been bothered to ask for more than a cursory translation of what the technology speakers have been talking about. The difference now is that companies are starting to talk the language of business and they expect the IT department and their suppliers to understand what they’re saying and to be able to converse with them without having to use a translation service. The IT vendors and channel partners who grasp this quickest and learn to use the language of business themselves will have a much greater chance of being "on the same wavelength" as their customers.
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