Stripping Back the Jargon - The World of Industrial IT

Written by Mike Charles,
Product Manager -
  Management Information Systems
SolutionsPT 

A new job always brings its fair share of daily lessons. Combine a new job with a change in industry and those lessons become very literal. There is an at times impermeable and obtuse wall of jargon impeding your progress. Cue hours of note taking, Wikipedia trawling, and spontaneous 'catch-ups' with well-meaning but increasingly 'very busy at the moment' colleagues.

This is not a hypothetical opinion-piece,  I am new to the world of Industrial IT. Previously I carved my furrow in commercial IT and specialised in Cloud Computing - so you might well expect me to have a considerable threshold for buzz-words and slightly opaque jargon. However, Industrial IT's acronyms is proving a worthy adversary.

To complicate things further some terms are brand new to me; while others are familiar in name only and actually mean related yet distinctly different things to their  'mainstream IT' equivalent.

It’s understandable that this might be the case. After all, we find ourselves in an industry where the technical coalfaces of engineering and IT collide; and I find myself wondering if its only me that's confused. If an IT guy like me is having a challenging time differentiating some of the terms I've encountered then how do those with a background in the manufacturing industry but less IT exposure find it? So I asked a few customers, and it turns out at least a few admit to being a little confused with some common terms also...

Some terms are clearly established such as HMI and SCADA, but to take a term such as 'MIS' (Management Information Systems) for example. Is that as clearly defined as the former? If I use this term to identify certain products are my colleagues, partners and customers consistently using it in the same way? My initial research suggests perhaps not.  Thus far I have heard Manufacturing Information Systems, Operational Intelligence, Manufacturing Insight, Manufacturing Data Management all used in what appears from the outside at least to be extremely similar situations (incidentally, welcome to anyone who has stumbled upon this while Googling for answers like I was just last month. No answers here, sorry!).

So I'm wondering if it’s worth stripping things right back to basics, to try to find language that all of us more intuitively understand, and requires less specialist knowledge. That the IT gatekeepers are as comfortable with as the engineering decision makers. Something every marketing professional knows  is that its crucial to talk in terms that your target market understands, and speak to their needs first and foremost. I'm unsure at the moment whether terms like MIS achieve this, or whether it all might be a bit like Klingon to certain parties not in the know (welcome  to Google's Trekkies also).

So before launching anything I'm going to undertake some market research. I've already been lucky enough to meet several of our customers, and I'm hoping to meet many more while doing this. I'll then share what I have learned in a future blog. 

It might turn out that each of the terms I've encountered has a very well defined usage and I just need to man up and learn them. But if my IT background has taught me anything, it’s that we do get carried away with our jargon!