One of my current work places is an IT department. A rather large IT department with about 100 guys working on Content Management. I have been involved in a number of projects now over the years and I proposed to strike a few words from our vocabulary. I am pretty sure this will help a lot in getting to solutions that actually work after the famous go-live date.

The first word I want to strike is ‘Business’. Ever seen or heard the text: and the business will have to this or that? What somebody is saying to you in that case is that he has no clue whatsoever as to who will do the real work. Most funny thing I ever heard when talking to ‘the business’ was this: We have to go and ask the business to solve this. Pardon me? I thought you were the business! No, we are the marketing department within the business unit. We only support the business. So when I banned the word from my vocabulary I found myself asking the question over and over again. Who do you mean? What’s their department, what’s their name? Who is actually doing the work? And do they know that? Very helpful insight!

Second word on my black list is ‘End-user’. What’s wrong with the word? First, it is rather disrespectful. It has nothing in it of the person you are doing your work for, instead it suggests that this person’s sole reason for living is to use your system. In real life, that person may be doing all kinds of things and interacting with your system is one of hundreds of things she is doing. Bad news for the IT guys: your system is not the center of the universe. The reason your system exists is to deliver valuable information to a person who knows what to do with it, what decisions and actions to take upon reading it. The so-called end-user is your judge, your reason for existence. Calling them end-user tells me you do not know them. You don’t know who they are and what role they play. So therefore anything you design for them is bound to fail. It really is that simple. If you really need a generic term I propose to use ‘audience, as suggested by Bob Boiko.

Now, lessons on how to blog suggest that you need at least a ‘3’ in your title. So I wondered, what would be the third word I would ban from my vocabulary? Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of participating in a media training. What I learned there is that I had to rewrite my entire vocabulary in order for non-IT and non-ECM people to understand me. That hurt! From that session I learned that talking about multidisciplinary projects did not do it (actually all that is about collaboration). Deliverables had to go. And even our favorite Enterprise Content Management should undergo drastic rewriting to be understood by senior management. We don’t mean to talk about ‘Enterprise’, it could just as well be a department. Every course on ECM start with a definition of ‘Content’. So we know quite well that it is the wrong word. How about using ‘information’ instead, or even better, take the time to know what information is in the interest of the person you are talking to and use that word.

Do you have any other words we need to ban from our vocabulary so our voices will be better heard?

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 14:45 and is filed under collaboration, communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.