The Hindu Business Line : Confusing picture

Of all services suppliers, IT and telecom suppliers use jargon the most, confusing the customer. They are followed by lawyers, marketing and PR agencies, in that order, says this survey.

BRICKBATS are more common in the lives of accountants but here are plaudits, that too for avoiding jargon. Difficult to believe, so I follow the lead from AccountingWeb to www.vianetworks.co.uk where among the latest press releases is one about "confusing tech jargon" leading to "wrong IT purchasing decisions".

VIA Net.Works, a networking and communications supplier in the UK, conducted the research "to discover how industry jargon affects the relationships between suppliers and their customers". For this, it surveyed some 340 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and found that the majority of vendors have not been leveraging language. Thus, even as corporate IT budgets have been shrinking and vendors scurry for orders, customers are actually getting alienated by the techie lingo. "More than three out of every four SMEs surveyed found technical jargon confusing," notes the communiqué, and nearly 8 per cent of respondents found that technical jargon was a total turnoff.

Here are the numbers: "51 per cent of respondents thought that IT and telecom suppliers were the biggest culprits for using confusing jargon out of all the services suppliers they deal with. Lawyers came second with 28 per cent, and marketing and PR agencies proved more jargon-ridden than accountants by coming in third position with over 11 per cent of the votes." Thus the IT and telecom suppliers confuse more than lawyers, marketing professionals and accountants all put together.

One in four respondents made incorrect purchasing decisions "because the jargon used by the vendor was confusing"; one in five SMEs feels vendors "should avoid using tech jargon completely and stick to plain English"; and almost all respondents (97 per cent) correctly defined the term `firewall,' proving that some IT terms are becoming much more commonly used, notes the survey.

Accounting-baiters may shrug at the undeserved praise heaped on bean counters. Be that as it may, what's alarming perhaps is that the IT people are too miserably messing up with their client communication.

Battery lasting years!

A RECENT report from Frost & Sullivan, a consulting firm, is about ZigBee. For those who know only Big B and Frisbee, the Z thing is explained in www.zigbee.org: "The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard."

Deepa Doraiswamy, the F&S analyst author of the report, observes that the efficacy of ZigBee technology lies in its ability to support applications with the varied data traffic types, such as periodic and intermittent. That's what Bluetooth is for, one might say, so Deepa writes that such a comparison is as between apples and oranges. "There exists very clear distinction between the two in various aspects of data rate, their communication protocol and the applications they cater to."

To elaborate: ZigBee employs carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) as its protocol, Bluetooth employs frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS). CSMA helps in "reduced current drain, longer battery life elimination of waiting time for polling" and suits the sensor and control applications that Zigbee is good at, rather than "hands-free audio applications and synchronisation of PC to PDA type applications" where Bluetooth scores. No competition, you see, but co-existence.

"Basically, ZigBee shall cater to wireless personal area network (WPAN) applications that cover short distance communication and control requiring low data rates. Applications such as automated meter reading, medical monitoring and control, and so on would fall under this category," illustrates Deepa. ZigBee is faster, looks like, because battery life is improved "from hours to months and even to years". From a sheer accounting angle, that should save a lot of running costs.

Squeeze return from IT-spend

COMPANIES should beef up their management practices before focussing on technology. Looks like truism, but that's been proved with numbers by McKinsey's research conducted with the London School of Economics. "Indeed, companies can significantly raise their productivity solely by improving the way they operate," write Stephen J. Dorgan and John J. Dowdy in their paper. Their analysis rated 100 randomly-selected companies on a scale of 0 to 5 to measure how well they used three important tools: "lean manufacturing, which cuts waste in the production process; performance management, which sets clear goals and rewards employees who reach them; and talent management, which attracts and develops high-calibre people."

No mean stuff because "a one-point improvement on the scale was correlated with a 25 per cent increase in a company's total factor productivity." This was almost equal to what's possible by "raising capital investment by 70 per cent or increasing workforce by 25 per cent." In contrast impact of additional computing power on productivity was but modest. Moral: "Good management is essential to squeeze productivity benefits from new investments in computers and software." Are the bosses heading to the IT rooms with lemon-juicers?

ITWorks@TheHindu.co.in

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