“Say what you mean” – new words please…

By: Steve Hughes - 27/01/2012

Having joined Colt in 2008, Steve Hughes is the leading Cloud and Virtualisation specialist for Colt Enterprise Services. Catch up with Steve’s latest views at http://www.twitter.com/coltandthecloud.

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Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

In a recent blog article, James Urquhart discussed the problems of “legacy terms for new models” – specifically in relation to cloud computing. In the article, James mentioned his twitter discussion with Andi Mann on the nature of “applications” and what they mean. This struck a chord - it is a problem that we all face in the IT and business world.

As James outlined in his blog post: System, Service, Application are words that are now being used to mean the same thing or slight variations of the same thing. The danger is that while the meaning of an application used to be clear (it was delivered in a box on a CD), in the web 2.0 world - and especially in an enterprise context- it is now a complex interconnection of functions.

Let’s take the example of “app” which obviously now has a consumer-related meaning. The app store model for mobile devices is starting to lead to an assumption that the same model of provisioning will work in the enterprise world. “If I can manage my personal life via apps on my phone, why can’t the same principle apply in my work life?”

But do enterprise apps really map to the single function applications of the consumer world? By defining apps as single function entities to be downloaded from a store, are we missing the interconnectedness of the modern business where sales, marketing, supply chain and finance are closely integrated – not only within the enterprise but across the customer and supplier landscape?


By using consumer terminology in an enterprise context, do we over-simplify the issue and perhaps force a model that doesn’t fit?  Already there are strong opinions forming about what the new Enterprise IT model will look like – and importantly how long will it take to come about. But this discussion and many others will be constrained by not having a common agreed vocabulary, not least of all between IT and the business. Similarly to cloud computing, we will be in danger of spending more time defining what we mean rather than addressing why we would do it.

Platform, Product, Solution, Capability – the Service Provider’s dilemma?

For service providers such as Colt, the issue of legacy words and their meanings has a significant impact. How do you talk to customers if the terms used are the same but the models they describe are changing?
We know that enterprise customers are increasingly looking for solutions to business needs, not just components. They are also looking to service providers to cut across legacy IT silos and come up with creative ways of combining business knowledge, development expertise and operational excellence – creating an Information Delivery Platform.

The words that we are increasingly using to describe our approach include capabilities, solutions and orchestration (note that we consider cloud as an IT operating model - not a solution to a particular business need). What we are looking to convey is that while we believe that a solid IT and network asset base is the crucial foundation – from managing the wide area network to data centres and infrastructure - it is only the starting position. The ability to rapidly combine these elements to provide a managed and manageable solution to a customer business problem is what counts.


The IT world is going through one of its regular disruptive changes and our services are changing with it – but care should be taken with the words we use and what we mean by them. To quote Edward de Bono: "In a sense, words are encyclopaedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better." It is an interesting dilemma.


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