Understanding business information is the most crucial task from where everything should start: data management may look like a new fancy word but IT development has always had to start from there.
Big companies are systems that generally works well as a system (perhaps not the most efficient, but that’s why there’s something to discuss here), though it doesn’t mean every individual understands fully why they are performing some tasks a certain way and not another because this has been implemented in the system through years of learning, correcting, adapting to errors or even technologies… At some point, means take over the end, but there is no way (and it would be a very bad idea) to review everything from scratch, loosing these years of experience for correcting a few issues.
Because most of companies are or should be focused on the information, the first step is to understand it, communicate that knowledge and not only the raw data which mean nothing without the right interpretation. The better is the understanding, the better will be the decisions made based on it.
Language is the first, best and probably the only tool to understand, communicate and perform any thinking process. No wonder why most of data-management methodologies put in “business glossaries” as corner stone of their approach. And not only: Domain Driven Design which comes from IT community is mainly founded on the concepts of ubiquitous language and contextualism, which philosophically makes a lot of sense.
But language is not something genetic, it’s like math, you have to learn it, you have to train, otherwise, you won’t reach certain level of complexity. It’s true while thinking, but it’s also true when communicating: as every kind of relationship, there are at least two people involved, responsibility is shared: one should try to be clear, the other should try to understand. And there’s rarely only one guilty. But then you need that people share the same level of language.
Power Point is a tool, it can be used correctly, but in its essence, it’s very NOT language oriented. As every tool, that’s not necessarily an issue if you use it for what it’s made for. But when people start to limit its vocabulary to buzz-words, then ubiquitous language becomes ambiguous, people’s prisms of understanding become limited and too much simplification in a few summary meetings becomes the norm. Expertise fades away and all what remains is plumbery diagrams, because unlike information, servers, databases and even software instances are still tangible when initial intentions are gone.
Everyone has heard about the story of Amazon forbidding Power Point, but the most important is to understand the argument behind: writing a four pages or text, that everyone should read from the beginning to the end is a very particular exercise. It forces to have content, structure, perhaps as good Power Points do, but because phrases are logically arranged, there is also the need for very strong logic sustaining the arguments.
But this is not only something that will help people to take better decisions, it has an effect way before and thus is even better for the company. While writing the document, the author is forced to think more on what he writes. Because what you understand should be easy to formulate. This is why Frank Frommer did not hesitate to call his book: “How Power Point makes you stupid”. 1
Last but not least, it has been demonstrated with students that even if they make a clear preference for Power Point based classes, the traditional way performs substantially better. 2
Next step will be to stop sending garbage mails: use the chat for that. But when something is very important that it deserves an true mail, then take a pencil and write it down manually… It takes so much time than you will probably think twice if it wouldn’t be easier to have an healthy discussion with your colleagues instead of spamming everyone. But that’s another story…
- Frank Frommer, “How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid: The Faulty Causality, Sloppy Logic, Decontextualized Data, and Seductive Showmanship That Have Taken Over Our Thinking”, The New Press; Illustrated edition (February 28, 2012)
- April Savoy, Robert W. Proctor, Gavriel Salvendy,
“Information retention from PowerPoint™ and traditional lectures”,
Computers & Education, Volume 52, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 858-867, ISSN 0360-1315, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.005
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131508002017