Are our acronyms a business anachronism?

Chris Gabriel of Logicalis to focus on business issues and speak in plain English

My FD grabbed me politely the other day and asked me to explain cloud to him without talking about technology. Well, I am a fine thinker on my feet, and I hope I have a reasonable grasp of the current business and public sector climate. He pushed his 3ft square calculator to the side of his desk, leant forward, and challenged me to translate cloud into real business value. Simples, as the furry little meerkat might say.

Well, three sentences in, I stumbled and nearly fell. I managed the 'moving from CapEx to OpEx' bit OK, and even managed to fit in the now obligatory, 'well, I'll explain cloud if we can all agree what it is we mean by cloud'. It was all going so well, when I stumbled headlong into IaaS and SaaS.

He had me; he smiled as if he had just found a debit in the credit column of his double-entry ledger.

"See, Chris, this is the problem, all you want to talk to me about is technology acronyms, and all I want to hear is about how cloud impacts my EBITDA."

Like a 200-grand-a-week Premiership footballer, I saw the chink of light through the keeper's legs, and was just about to slot home an easy winner: "Well you explain EBITDA to me, and I'll explain what IaaS is to you", when I realised he didn't have a point; he had the only point, that perhaps we continue to miss as an industry, and as a channel.

What is it we do if we can't translate the benefits of our acronyms into acronyms that make sense to the FD? Or the COO, the sales director, the retail manager, the council chief executive or the head of social services?

If the CEO is trying to rebuild the balance sheet and cloud can help them not have to build a new datacentre, then it makes perfect sense.

If the CFO is trying to remove depreciating assets, why do they have to appreciate the technical detail of cloud computing or software as a service?

As the CIO is challenged with delivering business-led innovation, they will be focused on the bandwidth of their team, not on building higher-speed connectivity.

Now, many of you will argue that we have been doing that for years, but, have we really?

I still sit through endless vendor presentations when the business value of a solution takes the first two or three slides of a fifty slide presentation.

I still hear architectural tag lines that describe how smart the vendor has been piecing together its own products into value architectures, and not about what business problem it solves or EBITDA accelerator it enables.

I tried to not drink, and eat healthily in January. My February resolution is to not mention a single technology acronym. When I told my wife she just rolled her eyes, "You, not use an acronym for a whole month? I'm LMAO...."

Enough said!

Chris Gabriel (pictured) is solutions and marketing director at Logicalis UK

Read his thoughts all this week on Views from the channel - and look out for a new guest blogger next week