…you either don’t understand it, or want you to think you don’t.
“We leverage synergistic data ecosystems to enable proactive value generation across verticals.” Find the actual content in that sentence. Go ahead.
It might as well have been said by a politician. The field of business intelligence is unfortunately a massive culprit of this kind of vague jargon. It sounds impressive, says very little, and mostly just leaves people confused.
Now, to be fair: jargon isn’t always bad. Used right, it helps people communicate precisely and efficiently. But some kinds of jargon – especially the vague, double-speak kind – aren’t there to help. They’re there to mask confusion, posture as an expert, or throw sand in your eyes so you can’t see that there’s not much behind the curtain.
If you’ve ever talked to someone with an ego the size of… well, something that needs an inter-continental container ship to be hauled, you know the type. They speak in vague, lofty terms. You try to find something useful in what they’re saying, but instead you just waste your energy decoding a whole lot of nothing.
And maybe that works for people who want to win ego contests. But small businesses don’t have time or money for that.
Language and precision matter a lot when making important decisions. If you’re vague when explaining your data, you’ll be vague when making decisions, and bad decisions come with a price, sooner or later.
Some of the topics in this blog might look very simple. That’s partly because some of them are adapted from a course I used to teach to first-year students at a faculty. Just translated into a business context. These concepts don’t bring anything new to the table, but their point isn’t to be original. In small business, you have to make things work and not think about all the concepts they teach at the faculty. The point of the blog is to be useful and explain those concepts in a simple way, no matter their complexity.
Explaining something simply doesn’t mean it’s basic. It means we’ve done the thinking for you. We try to avoid BI jargon as much as possible and use simple terms anyone can understand. And if we do need to use technical terms, we link to explainer articles.
Because if someone’s trying really hard to sound smart, they’re probably trying to inflate their ego, or make you feel stupid. Maybe they are trying to impress someone or entertain themselves.
Either way – this is annoying, so we follow the philosophy of clarity over cleverness. Our dashboards follow this philosophy: they might not look flashy but they’re built to make sense at a glance. And our blogs follow this philosophy. We hope they are of use.
