“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.”
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.
