The world has over 7000 known living languages grouped into about 150 high-level language families (English belongs to the Indo-European family). That’s an incredible amount of diversity – about 1 million speakers per language.
Language is at the heart of culture. Indeed, we judge each other based on the words we use and how we use them even when we are speaking the same language. Ain’t or isn’t; God bless or good luck;shouldn’t we? or we should.
It’s true for organizations too. Each of us belongs to an organization with its own unique culture and language. An Enterprise Architect (EA) is charged with guiding their organization towards its vision by communicating with its leaders and members the boundaries and checkpoints that lie ahead. Effective EA’s will recognize early on the need to use words that resonate with their leadership and culture.
Tailor your terminology
When you use ABACUS, Avolution’s enterprise architecture modeling tool, take advantage of in-built functionality to change the words you use to fit the audience:
Remember that talking about Physical Application Components and Business Services isn’t going to help you when you need to get the ear of leadership.
Instead use words you know they understand. Technology and Operations. You can use TOGAF terminology in your models. But choose your organization’s terminology when you show your models. Remember the lesson of Esperanto…
Guess how many speakers there are of Esperanto? Up to 2 million worldwide with varying degrees of fluency – with a few thousand native speakers. Esperanto has some eager proponents around the world including Google, Duolingo (a popular language learning site), Wikipedia, and its very own university! Not bad for a completely made up language.
But even the university requires academic papers to be written in both Esperanto and a second language.
– Luis Fernandez
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About ABACUS
Avolution produces the ABACUS software suite, used to manage IT and business strategy. ABACUS users can move quickly, collaborating to deliver on enterprise architecture and digital transformation goals. Import and centralize data in minutes, build models and roadmaps, run analytics and algorithms, report with rich visuals and dashboards.