IT vendors need to be more careful with their audience, and the audience needs to shout up more, especially when they don't get it.

I found myself at a CEO round table event in Reading last week taking part in a discussion on IT service management. Beyond the title there wasn't really a specific agenda, and given the nature of the topic we covered quite a lot of ground. An excellent way to spend an afternoon getting back into the swing of things after not really thinking about work for a few weeks, having been on holiday.

While away my wife and I did our usual bit of diving, and I recall one of the best pieces of advice I've ever been given regarding this pursuit is that once you get down there, don't rush, take your time, move slowly, stay relaxed and when communicating, make clear, deliberate signals so your buddy can easily comprehend what you are trying to articulate.

That advice, given to me back in '99 when I started diving, suddenly became very relevant to some of the things I'd been saying and thinking about this year, which I blogged about back in May, and some of the things I was hearing around the round table and elsewhere.

Through no deliberate fault of anyone at the event or in the industry in general the bandying around of imprecise, mixed up metaphors and messaging and the rush to get from explaining why ITSM is important to showing off the latest software product is somewhat confusing to the uninitiated at quite an important time.

Our research has shown that in so far as the mainstream market goes, we are on the verge of a significant shift from 'old' IT management to 'new' IT management, where 'service' becomes the easy to understand common language between the business guys who need to be able to articulate their needs to the IT guys, and where the IT guys need to be able to translate those requirements into something tangible, measurable and deliverable.

I think that in order to give the mainstream market half a chance at succeeding, we need to slow down a bit and make sure what we say is logical, sensible, understandable and above all, practical and achievable. The bottom line is remembering who your audience is, and choosing an appropriate approach:

Business leaders want to know if their IT investment is paying off, but don't necessarily want to know all about what CMDB does.

End-users want to get on with their jobs and probably don't need to know too much about what's behind their applications—but they do need training to keep them consuming the business services IT supports, rather than becoming a resource drain on IT support services.

IT guys need to understand what it is that the business needs them to enable and support—so collaboration and mutual understanding are vital if there is to be progress made. But don't let that fact blur the lines so much that the messaging becomes the same for both parties.

Care needs to be taken when boldly stating that these days, IT is the business, when really, retailers have always been retailers and banks have always been banks—they just rely much more heavily on IT these days to do what they do. But that's not the same as being an IT company.

Oh, and ITIL is NOT software.

To recap: this post is a warning to IT vendors—pay attention to whom you are talking to and, a request of the end-user community, don't put up with confusing, inaccurate stuff any more.