Tone it Down

Experience and anecdotal evidence has given me the impression that IT departments have a generally bad rap in just about any given company. They're widely perceived as controlling, condescending, uncooperative and uncommunicative. My last job was a prime example, and my current job suffers from this to some extent. I have long realized that simple, frequent and effective communication goes a long way toward eliminating, or at least mitigating, the negative perception that many IT departments have... and being someone who excels at communication (especially written communication) I'm usually the gut guy who sends these memos out. If I don't send them out, I draft them and have the boss send it out. I'm sort of a written variation of Cyrano De Bergurac.

As it turns out, my predecessor at my new job was downright draconian as an IT guy... the epitome of the arrogant, egotistical, controlling IT geek. My cohort and I have been discussing how to loosen things up a bit... less frequent password changes, fewer passwords remembered, and other little things that individually don't make a lot of difference, but collectively show our end users that we plan to give them a little bit of freedom, and treat them like adults. We're still not 100% sure what we're going to change, because the previous idiot created a labyrinth of security policies, firewall rules and spam filters, and failed to do any documentation. We can quickly and easily do a few little changes here and there, but if we get too reckless, we could create some major unintended headaches.

Like I said though, re-aligning ourselves with the company isn't just a matter of doing these changes, it's also a matter of communicating these changes, and carrying a continuous dialogue with our end users. After easing up the password policy, I decided to communicate the changes, and to let them know about our upcoming Exchange implementation (we're currently using a crappy POP3 mail system).

I typed up the memo, edited it for clarity and content, and fired it off to my supervisor, so she could review it and subsequently send it out to the company. Knowing my above-average ability to construct virtually anything of the written variety, I was sure that I'd blow her away with my vocabularical prowess. (Hey, if Bush can say "I'm the decider," I can say "vocabularical!") I was halfway right. She read what I wrote, called me, and said "I love what you wrote, but..." "...people in this company aren't used to reading stuff like this."

"Ummm, what do you mean?" After thinking about it a bit, I made a couple of realizations... the majority of the folks in my new company are either foreign-born, or factory workers. I ventured a guess. "Did I use too many big words?"

"Yeah."

"Oh." I told her that I could tone it down in the future, and recommended that she edit what I'd written and send it out, in order to give me an idea of how to construct the next email. My last job required me to write everything out, being incredibly detailed AND political. This one apparently will allow me to write by the seat of my pants. In other words, I can tone it down a bit.