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Good morning. Welcome to another video blog by Fortress Technology Planners. Today we are going to continue
our series on IT skills and will be talking about technical terms. The IT industry is
full of technical terms: all of the components, all of the technologies. There are a large number
of nouns that are involved: all of the little pieces, bits and pieces and components that make up
these systems all have some specific names. We also have a large number of verbs, action
words that describe usually what system component is doing or what system is doing at that moment.
The truth is, in IT and we have too many words. We have such a large variety
of terms involved that unless you are specialized in IT it becomes very difficult for you to
learn all those terms and what their exact meaning is and how they are subtly different one from the
other. What we have as an effect of that, as a result of that, is that business stakeholders,
business people, can't keep up with the number of terms that are in the IT industry. Who
could blame them? What business people tend to do is learn a few terms here and there and then
use those terms in a much broader sense than they are actually intended to cover a larger
number of different things that may or may not be somewhat related to what they are describing. A classic example
here, you'll often hear people refer to their workstation as "hard drive". "My hard drive
won't start. I can't log into my hard drive." Really the hard drive is just a component within that
workstation system. At some point along the way that business person learned the word hard drive and associates
it with the larger component which is really made up of five or ten different things in addition
to the hard drive. Where this starts to create an issue is obviously with communication. When business
people are calling the help desk or communicating with an IT professional and they are describing
a problem with their "hard drive", the IT professional always has to translate. They always have to remember
"I'm speaking to a business professional right, who doesn't always use the correct terms."
and figure out what do they mean by hard drive. The crazy thing is the person who is sitting at the
next desk could mean something completely different. They might mean the exact and proper
technical term or they may have a different interpretation and be applying
that term to your different technology or different type of component. It's always a guessing game
for the IT professional figure out: "what is that this person is really talking about?" As
the IT professional starts to develop some repeated relationships with these business
professionals, we get to know, When Bob says hard drive, this is what he means. When Mary says
hard drive, she means something different and when Jim says hard drive, he really means the actual
hard drive component. The terms in our industry are vastly misused by business people and by
people who are not specialists in IT. Many times this is just part of doing business. The IT
professional does that translation, figures out what that business person means, and goes
about addressing the problem. They may ask some questions and further investigate what they
are talking about to understand what it is. Sometimes it is not big a deal, sometimes it does take a little
bit more time, but in some cases this can go vastly wrong. The issue that is reported by the business
stakeholder can be interpreted completely incorrectly, vastly incorrectly, because that
business stakeholder isn't using the proper technical terms. If you are the individual in your small
or medium-sized business is responsible for IT, but maybe you are not specialized in that area, then learning
these industry terms is something that I think is of high value to you. I'm not saying you
should go and take a course and start to go through all of the details of these things,
but I would take that "word a day" kind of approach. Can you learn one new technical term
every day or when your solution provider comes and helps you with a problem, can you ask them:
"please tell me a good definition for two terms of that relate to this problem." That's
a great way to learn some new terms because you have something concrete that you can reference, that you can work
with, that you can remember and will help bring meaning to those terms to you. What will happen over
time as you expand and create that vocabulary, you will dramatically ease your communication with
your technical professionals. You'll be able to state your problems more clearly. You will be able to
your needs more precisely. You will be able to get your expectations across in a way that the
IT professional can immediately understand without having to translate and attempt to
understand what it is that you are talking about. All of these things will make life easier for your IT professional.
More importantly, it will make them more effective and efficient addressing at your needs. Anything
that makes them more efficient and effective is obviously a direct benefit to you and to you organization.
This has been Jonathan Nituch from Fortress Technology Planners, a Calgary IT support company and
we will speak you tomorrow.