Swap out a few terms in a recent New York Times story about farmers’ attempt to split California, and you might see the IT vs. business saga.
Lyza
Rejecting stale tech marketing words
Read a pile of technology marketing and you quickly assume that you alone despise many of the words you keep hearing. They’re words like optimize, leverage, synergy, and utilize. People in this industry don’t really talk like that, do they?
Many don’t, at least not in private, and they don’t tweet like that, either. One tweet trail at Gartner BI Summit complained about exactly this kind of word — these miserable words with all the wild flavor bred out of them like factory-farm tomatoes.
On the list of suggested extinction, Jill Dychè listed optimize and fact-based. Scott Davis listed leverage, co-optition, and dot-bomb.… Read the rest “Rejecting stale tech marketing words”
Don’t call me “non-technical”
When I’ve referred to “non-technical” users, I’ve always meant just about anyone working far away IT. Well, based on research by Lyzasoft’s CEO Scott Davis, I think I’d better be careful with that definition.
My concern is not for IT people. It’s for the “quants” in finance, marketing, accounting and operations who may not write code or maintain computer networks but do go deep into math, data and logic most work days. These “quants” resent being called “non-technical” by the IT types. The quants shoot back: knowing SQL, they might point out, is easy compared with modeling demand elasticity.
The mutual disrespect is too bad, especially since the two technical types have more in common than those who rely on “guts.”