Example 1

Geek: “Our devices are having handshake problems related to the recognition of communications protocol.”
English: “Sorry – you can’t use your iPhone to access your work files today.”

Example 2

Geek: “Our cloud-based data has become corrupted and we are going to miss the recovery time objective and recovery point objective laid out in the information technology service continuity (ITSC) plan.”
English: “We have lost your board presentation and won’t be able to get it back until tomorrow.”

Example 3

Geek: “Multiple copies of packets are being sent to the SPAN port, decreasing effective bandwidth capability.”
English: “If you send an email then it might take longer to arrive than normal.”

Example 4

Geek: “A Trojan horse has installed itself on a host computer within our network as an anonymiser proxy.”
English: “Our computer system has been hacked, providing a major security threat.”

Example 5

Geek: “Combining a clustering with a virtualisation approach can help us integrate our mainframe and distributed infrastructure.”
English: “We can reduce hardware and staff costs associated with running our computer systems.”

Example 6

Geek: “Efficiencies can be gained by upgrading secure data management for mission-critical online transaction processing applications, query-intensive data warehouses, content management and Web2.0 applications.”
English: “If we spend some money to improve our hardware and software, the company can save money in the long run.”

Read our main feature on the management challenges of decoding IT lingo

Peabody Trust director Martin Carpenter’s views on IT management – do you agree?