The Inovis Blog

Anyone who spends any amount of time around me when I get on my marketing soapbox knows that I hate jargon. I have worked in high-tech for my entire career. Started at a PR firm working with telecommunication software and hardware companies predominantly. And as anyone who has worked in telecom can tell you, it is an industry packed with jargon and acronymns. So much so that Harry Newton publishes the Newton’s Telecom Dictionary.

Harry cranked out the 23rd annual edition recently. That’s a lot of years spent living in acronym purgatory. Never met the man, but I almost feel sorry for him. I owned a copy of the Telecom Dictionary, so that I could speak intelligently with engineers with MBAs in their chosen language. It was a well-worn copy and a great investment. But this was back when IT was there for IT’s sake, and IT spending in the shadow of telecom deregulation post-1996 was like an arms race….who could outspend the other guy or gal. When people in our neighborhood asked me what I did for a living, I would often reply that I worked for the CIA. Of course I didn’t work for the CIA, but it was a heckuva lot easier to give that explanation than truly explain the level of geek-hood that had befallen me in my chosen profession.

And while I spend a good deal of time talking pretty esoteric high tech topics with some people in our industry who I think of as giant floating brains (and yes we use long-winded terms that would make the eyes of a true non-tech business leader glaze over), sometimes I have to take a shower at the end of the day to wash off the acronyms and jargon.

I have opined with other marketing folks and writers about our acronym plight. But the truth is that other industries are as guilty as we tend to be. My wife is a school teacher, and I can tell you that their use of jargon and acronyms would make an IT director blush, but I digress.

The point here is that I have company. I am not an island. Thank goodness! In her most recent blog entry titled , eWeek’s Careers blogger, Deb Perelman, writes about how technology jargon can actually hurt your careers. In an era of shrinking or flat IT budgets and more calls from the business owners for justification around IT investments, it’s more important than ever to talk straight, shoot straight and drop the jargon!