If I knew what the heck you were saying, I’d be impressed: The importance of communication and measurement in justifying IT costs.

I’m reading some “at-a-glance” promotional material for a major new network hardware product. There is a slight problem though. I can’t make heads or tails of it.
Certainly I can’t figure out what it’s trying to say either “at a glance” or after hours of technical study. This could be because I don’t have the necessary educational background to appreciate it – although I’m a smart guy, my formal education and my experience is in editing and writing.

But it is exactly that – my experience in editing and writing – that leads me to write this.

The problem is that this promotional material is packed with technical details presented without context. I couldn’t tell you anything particularly insightful regarding it, because it seems to be a bunch of buzzwords strung together. In the end, I’m having trouble figuring out what business problems this piece of hardware solves.

While no one would ask that technical material to make it more accessible but less accurate, there are ways of writing which provide context and enough information for the uninitiated to make informed decisions.

But tons of material which supposedly explains the benefit of IT products from scores of companies is written in a confusing manner which simply doesn’t make the information clear. These may be written for “the experts” but not everyone who needs to know about networking will have an expert’s level of comprehension of the subject. IT managers and CIOs are often generalists whose greatest skills are in management, rather than engineering, and it is IT managers and CIOs who have to decide what projects get funded and which ones do not.

IT executives are busy today with a whole host of problems. Infrastructure, Sarbanes-Oxley, Network Performance, Application Development… combine all of this with the belt-tightening of the predicted upcoming recession, and it becomes important to make your case with the absolute least amount of time and effort required by the person who makes the purchasing decisions. It’s critical in enterprise IT to explain things as simply as possible, and relate the information to the business.

At last year’s symposium, Joel Trammell, CEO of NetQoS, made communicating to IT executives a key part of his keynote address. It’s a well-established truism that if the CIO doesn’t have time to understand it, he’s not going to buy it.