IT and Enterprise Transformation 101: Why Words Matter

[MichaelDortch]

If you haven't yet, you should immediately read my friend and colleague Stephen Mann's recent take on User-Centric IT. It is not only thought-provoking and incredibly relevant, but timely (and, of course, well-written).

A mere two days after Stephen's post landed on the ServiceNow Community Web site, Tom Pisello, "The ROI Guy" and founder of sales and marketing tools provider Alinean, posted "It's All Greek to Me." In that post, Tom argues that to get frugal buyers moving, sales and marketing efforts need to take an approach first described some 2,300 years ago by Aristotle. Those efforts need to focus on pathos (emotions), logos (logic and reason) and ethos (credibility). In other words, the things about which buyers care most, and not the things on which vendors tend to focus — their own offerings and messages.

Only two paragraphs in, and I'm sure you're already asking why the heck any of this matters to you. Here's why.

Whether you're in IT, technical support, sales, marketing or any other field that involves interaction with other humans, you face a constant challenge. That challenge: to interact with your constituents in ways most meaningful to them. In many instances, this requires a shift in your focus, away from what you care most about or had planned to say, and towards listening to and learning from those constituents.

This is a key element of the shift from IT's traditional "inside-out" focus to the more user/service-centric "outside-in" approach at the heart of the Universal Service Management Body of Knowledge (USMBOK). It's also an approach championed by a growing number of IT decision makers and influencers, such as ITIL pioneer and consultant Ian Clayton and Dr. Shue-Jane Thompson of Lockheed-Martin, a Distinguished Professional in Service Management and ITIL expert who has presented at several Knowledge conferences. (If you registered for Knowledge14 and are a ServiceNow Community member, you can download her presentations from that conference at the Knowledge14 Exclusive Registrant Content folder.)

When I was an industry analyst at a firm that consulted with enterprise IT decision-makers, we used to advise them to bring one person to each vendor meeting with two stopwatches. That person was to use one stopwatch to measure the number of minutes the vendor spoke, and the other to measure the number of minutes the vendor listened. We then advised our clients to throw out every vendor who talked more than they listened.

The result of all that listening is supposed to be to tailor the words you say to align as closely and credibly as possible with the primary concerns of each constituent. This is definitely not the same thing as telling the constituent "whatever they want to hear," a common and sadly, frequently valid criticism of sales and marketing people and their messages. What it is instead is carefully choosing the words that strike the optimal balance between your intended message and your constituents' concerns. (Just one reason why there are multiple ways to say or describe anything.)

Some 26 years ago, soon after I first met my wife, we got into a spirited debate over a now-long-forgotten topic. When I asked her to clarify something she'd said, she retorted that I was now "just quibbling over words." And before my internal editor could seize control, I found myself grinning at her and saying, "What else you got?"

Words matter, in every exchange you have with every human being you encounter. The more mindful you are when choosing your words, the better those exchanges will go, for you and everyone else involved. Makes for more effective storytelling, too.