Are you thrown by techno terms? - Net.Matters - MSO.net's Monthly Newsletter - Sep 2005

The survey by IT recruitment consultancy firm, Computer People found that 75% of office workers waste as much as one hour a week trying to understand the meaning of a technical term.  Surprisingly, it's not just the more mature employee who feels alienated - younger workers are frustrated too. 

In an effort to see how communication between IT departments and their non-IT colleagues could be improved; the survey was conducted across different industries and questioned 1,000 office workers regarding their perception of IT.

The results are interesting and perhaps demonstrate that IT professionals are overestimating the degree of knowledge possessed by others.  (Please take the time to answer our questionnaire - we want to know your thoughts on the subject.)

Of those surveyed, 56% felt that IT professionals “speak another language” with 40% feeling that those ‘in the know' were unaware of the confusion they had caused.  This causes an over-reliance on IT staff - over two-thirds of those questioned agreed with this scenario.

This can have important repercussions in terms of security.  More than one in four said that they were unsure of the function of a firewall with many tempted to turn it off.

The top 5 culprits in terms of jargon were defined as:

1.  Bandwidth - The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time.
2.  HTML - Hypertext Markup Language - A system which allows web developers to direct users to other web pages by clicking on links on either an image or word(s) within specific web pages or documents.
3.  Hostname - on a network, each computer has its own unique name.
4.  Alias - one of several alternative hostnames with the same email address.
5.  IP address - Internet address.

What's the answer?

Most of those questioned (67%) suggested that the easiest way to understand IT issues would be to use analogies.  By explaining a ‘techy' problem in terms of the workings of a car or road map, office workers felt that the picture would look a whole lot clearer.

Some of those surveyed (21%) felt that diagrams and flowcharts would further help understanding with 10% wanting to see the provision of jargon-free literature such as hints and tips documents.