CIOs constantly speak about the need to drop the technical jargon and talk “the language of business.” Yet, they don’t except business to do the same.
They say their colleagues in the other departments — finance, marketing, sales, operations — are more digitally literate and technically astute than ever before, but CIOs rarely press their co-workers to get better at tech talk.
There’s no demand from IT for the rest of the organization to learn the collection of acronyms, catchphrases, and jargon that serve as shorthand for the tools and techniques of the IT trade — even as the language of IT spills out across the enterprise and society itself.
And as it does, many still don’t know exactly what they’re talking about, according to CIOs and other IT leaders. Many workers co-opt phrases, fail to get the terminology right, and overuse jargon — often to the point where the terms begin to lose their true meaning, breaking down communication, collaboration, and, at times, business-IT alignment.
CIO.com has polled tech leaders over the years to spell out the terms they most often hear misused. Here’s what they have to say about most misused buzzwords today.
1. Digital transformation
“Digital transformation” continuously tops this list, cited by more sources than any term. That shouldn’t surprise anyone in IT — or business in general — as nearly any change (big or small) seems to be labeled transformative.
“‘Digital transformation’ is one of those terms that is both vague and yet so widely used to the point of being a required phrase associated with any larger IT investment and even on any IT/technology resume,” says Greg Barrett, CEO and founder of GMB Consulting, which provides fractional/interim CIO services and senior advisor support. “When you ask a person what they mean by that term, they usually struggle to come up with an answer. If they do provide an answer, it usually is a general, high-level type of a description.”
So does Barrett define the term?
“The operative word in this phrase is ‘transformation,’” he says. “So a digital transformation effort must be something that utilizes technology — a new tool/platform, a new application, etc. — that helps transform a company, i.e., propels the company forward by creating a new offering, a way of addressing a business need, etc.”
He adds: “When we hear this term, as technology leaders, we should ask the questions: One, what is actually the need? Two, what is seeking to be accomplished? And, three, how will this be accomplished? Answering these questions will promote a much greater understanding across all stakeholders, enabling better informed decisions.”
2. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and intelligence in general
Tied for the second spot are all the terms around artificial intelligence: AI, machine learning, and just about everything else around digital intelligence. Technology leaders say there’s general confusion about what these terms actually mean.
“Misunderstood is putting it lightly. Overhyped is the word I’d use,” says Art McCann, senior vice president of IT for Bell Partners, a multifamily asset management firm.
McCann says people now use “AI” to denote anything having to do with “automation and anything with basic algorithms.”
“It just seems to get thrown out there,” he says. “And it is also thrown around as a panacea for everything, with the thinking that it can make your business better. But true AI applications are much narrower, and most AI [in the enterprise] today is machine learning.”
He is trying to tackle the overuse and misuse of the term within his own organization by explaining the differences among the various types of intelligence. “That’s the education piece that I’m trying to do internally,” he says.
3. Strategic
“Strategic” also deserves a spot on this list, says George Westerman, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, CIO award co-chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Awards, and a member of the Digital Strategy Roundtable for the US Library of Congress.
People mistakenly think they’re strategic simply because they have a business goal, work toward a specific objective, or — in the case of the CIO —report to the CEO, he says.
“Strategic is one of those things we all want to be, but if you’re being really strategic, you know where you’re going and have a plan to get there even if you’re doing some pivoting along the way,” adds Westerman, who is also founder of MIT’s Global Opportunity Initiative.
4. Agile and DevOps
People today also like to think they’re agile. But confusion can arise when IT teams talk about being agile. Are they talking about being adaptable? Or about developing software following the agile methodology?
Jim A. Jorstad, interim CIO at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, says he has heard people apply “agile” to a range of concepts, although he advocates for the business and IT to limit use of the term to speaking specifically about the development methodology.
“It’s not just about flexibility and adaptable or quick to change. ‘Agile’ is more specific than that,” he says. “It’s a work methodology, but I don’t think people really know that’s what it means.”
Yugal Joshi, a partner at global research and management consulting firm Everest Group, sees a similar phenomenon around “DevOps,” which was coined to describe a very specific type of team but has since been broadened to cover more variations of team configurations.
“‘DevOps’ as a term means different things at different companies,” Joshi explains. “DevOps is truly where everyone can do both developments and operations, where everyone can do everything; there are no developers and there’s no separate ops people. Everyone on the team can do everything and everyone is fungible. But sometimes it’s used to mean one team where they have separate developers and separate ops [people].”
5. Product, platform, application, as-a-service
Joshi says the words “products” and “platforms” likewise have incorrectly expanded beyond their original definitions.
The definition of “product” in the world of agile and Scrum is something that satisfies a business need, delivers measurable value to stakeholders, and has clear boundaries, customers, and stakeholders.
While that definition may hold in some IT shops, Joshi says it’s also merged with “product” in the more common, everyday sense of the word to mean any deliverable coming from IT.
“Platform” also once had a more rigid definition, Joshi says, explaining that it once referred to a set of services.
“Now a lot of enterprise vendors and the software product companies have started to call their products ‘platforms’ by building a lot of add-ons, but I still think of platforms as a common set of services; that definition is well-established,” he adds. “IT is more or less settled on the definition of ‘platform’ as that, but outside of IT? Forget it. They’s say, ‘I want to deploy a CRM platform.’ They use products and platforms interchangeably.”
Joshi says this trend has even impacted the term “application.”
“You might hear a microservices team say they’re building an application, which they’re not technically doing, as applications are for the end user. And now ‘application’ can even mean a small bit of code or a service,” he says.
Diane Carco, president and CEO of management consulting company Swingtide and a former CIO, adds the term “as-a-service” to the list, too, saying it is misused to apply to plain products and services and not as it was “originally intended, where you’re getting something bundled, where you’re getting the hardware, software, and people, where you’re not buying the ingredients, but you’re getting the meal. Now people refer to ingredients as ‘as-a-service.’”
6. Microservices
Staying with the technical theme, Tammy Bilitzky, CIO of the Data Conversion Laboratory, has called out “microservices,” too.
“Microservices is an architectural style that embraces a loosely coupled group of services each of which should be easy to test and independent of each other and expose a minimum of functionality. Instead, it has come to mean any system that uses more than one web service call,” she says.
7. Edge computing
Yet another technical term that puzzles people.
“‘Edge computing’ is often used to mean different things,” says John Gordon, HP senior vice present and president of HPS Managed Solutions. “Is it simply technology that isn’t in the cloud? Does networking equipment count? At HP, we generally think of the edge as compute power that is outside of the cloud and data centers. This includes devices like PCs, conference room equipment, and printers but also extends to things like customer analytics in retail stores or voice dictation systems in hospitals. What makes the edge unique is that it is distributed across many different physical locations.”
8. Demand management
CIOs everywhere face a long list of requests, forcing them to get good at prioritizing the most important projects. But the idea that they should manage others’ demands is a tall order — earning the term a spot on this list.
“There are many different stakeholders with many different needs that seem to change on a weekly basis. This constant change creates constant demand on the IT department. The notion that IT can manage demand is false; IT can simply manage its capacity,” says Susan Snedaker, CIO at El Rio Health.
9. Bandwidth
The term “bandwidth” also gets a vote here, given its common misappropriation. As many technologists know, the word has a very technological meaning. But now it’s incorrectly used as a reference to available time.
“It’s for speed and capacity. It’s not about your time availability,” Jorstad protests. “It’s a word that distracts. So just say what you mean: ‘I don’t have time to work on this.’”
10. No-code/no IT required
Several CIOs cited these terms as misnomers, noting that, first, all software has code (even if the users can do some light programming without having to code) and, second, enterprise software deployments still require IT work.
“This is one of the most loathsome buzz phrases I see used and misused. I am always annoyed when I read a solution vendor’s website claiming ‘no IT required,’” Snedaker says, adding that this is more than a linguistic issue.
“Advertising ‘no IT required’ misleads organizations — and end users — and creates a potentially dangerous shadow IT path,” Snedaker explains. “While a vendor’s solution may not require heavy IT involvement, it always requires some IT involvement — from assessing the security of the solution (especially for organizations in regulated industries) to ensuring users are properly provisioned, and from ensuring corporate data is safe to ensuring data can be repatriated.”
She adds: “IT should always be at the table as a partner in facilitating the IT solutions approved by organizational leadership for use in conducting company business.”
11. Tech debt
Carco calls out “tech debt” as a term that can mean different things to different people, inside and outside of the IT department.
“‘Technical debt’ is used a lot, and it’s often misunderstood,” she says. “We hear it thrown about all the time and no one ever says, ‘What do you mean by that?’ Everyone thinks it’s something they should know.”
Some define it as problematic code knowingly deployed for the sake of speed, with the understanding that teams would fix it later. Others use the term to refer to legacy systems or the cost of maintaining them.
Carco has seen a few CIOs play on the ambiguity of the term, with its sense of financial needs, to get more money for IT budgets. “Because the term has ‘debt’ in it, there’s a sense that it’s something you owe and you can’t do anything about it,” she adds.
Good luck getting a consensus on the term. Carco says she used ChatGPT and a Google search to see how others define it but found she “didn’t agree with the definitions at all.”
12. Data terms
There’s lots to misunderstand here: data warehouse, data lake, data fabric, data mining, big data, etc. And, like AI, the world of data is promoted as the salvation to all sorts of problems.
McCann points to the use of the phrase “big data” as example of those elements at work. Many people take “big data” simply to mean a lot of data, implying that the volume of data is the solution — when that’s far from reality.
“It’s overhyped, and it’s treated in a way that [makes it seem that] more data is better while ignoring data quality, the source of where it’s coming from, if it’s being entered correctly,” McCann says. “The reality is that without proper tools to manage data, it’s just a bunch of noise and doesn’t give you want you need for your business.’
13. Data breach
Sticking with the data theme, Thomas Phelps IV, Laserfiche CIO and a member of the Society for Information Management (SIM) Research Institute advisory board, calls out “data breach” as another problematic phrase.
“Along with terms like ‘AI’ and ‘digital transformation,’ the term ‘data breach’ can be misapplied and misused in the wrong context with significant repercussions,” he says. “In cybersecurity, terms like ‘security event,’ ‘incident,’ and ‘breach’ are commonly used. Security events are any types of occurrences in a service, system, or network that could have a security implication, such as user log-ons or file downloads. By itself, the activity may not be malicious, a violation of policies, or have legal implications.
“A security incident is an event or series of events that appear anomalous and could adversely impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system. There could be an indicator of compromise or a violation of a security policy that warrants an investigation. By itself, a security incident is not a data breach,” he continues. “A breach is when there is a loss of regulated data, compromise of a system, or unauthorized disclosure, but this has significant legal implications and is defined by different laws, regulations, and even specific business contracts. This includes the recent SEC cybersecurity disclosure rule, along with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and other regulatory requirements.”
Semantics matter, Phelps says. “If you look at what happened recently with a software update for a leading endpoint security solution, that incident was characterized as a content update incident and not security breach. Many software agreements have terms and contractual remedies that apply specifically to a security or data breach,” he explains. “Unless your legal department has been involved in identifying a security incident as a breach, IT personnel should not be using the term ‘data breach’ under any circumstances.”
14. Multicloud
On a similar note, IT exec Ken Piddington has called out misuse of “multicloud.” He goes with what he calls the “truest definition,” which is when “you have architected a single system with multiple cloud components from different cloud providers or services.”
Yet many people think multicloud describes an enterprise that has a mix of cloud vendors and software-as-a-service offerings.
“We see more businesspeople get it wrong, but also some tech people, too,” he says. “I don’t think it’s the end of the world using this one wrong, but it’s always bothered me. But then once you understand it, you can have a better conversation about the challenges of it and the reasons to go for it.”
15. Meta anything
There’s a whole bunch of terms, technologies, and concepts that can be grouped in this category. They include metaverse, blockchain, crypto, digital twins, and NFTs. As Ram Palaniappan, CTO of TEKsystems, explains, the metaverse is “all about creating an equivalent in a virtual world” yet he and others say many people still struggle to get their heads around this idea.