CIO Ramon Baez of Kimberly Clark - I Like This Guy

Today's Wall Street Journal had a blurb from their Business Tech Blog about Ramon Baez who has started a campaign against jargon within the company.  Wow - this is a seemingly simple thing but something a lot of organizations with their own language, e.g., finance, IT, etc fail to do.

The blog posting which I've included below almost in its entirety is refreshing because of Baez's outlook.

Baez has tried to eradicate tech speak and acronyms since joining the consumer-goods giant a little over a year ago. He’s starting with the emails that the information-technology department sends out whenever it has to make changes to a system. You probably know these messages: They’re the ones that make your eyes glaze over for the three seconds it takes to find the delete button.

Baez tells the Business Technology Blog that these emails used to say things like the TFPS server will be unavailable on Saturday. “Even I don’t know what that is,” Baez says, adding that the information is useless unless it’s clear to people what a system does. When Baez sought out the source of the email, he found it was sent by the team that manages that server in India.

In order to make sure that his staff is sending out messages with information people can use, he’s brought in communications staffers to vet each outbound email. And he insists that the emails make it clear who a message is intended for, with language like “if you use this system please read on.” That way, people who don’t use it can delete the message immediately.

Baez also made sure he solved one other consequence of the dreaded email from IT: Tech staffers must coordinate maintenance schedules with the rest of the business. That way, no one will time a network upgrade for the one weekend when everybody has to work.

This last point is so incredibly key.  How many times have I seen or experienced tech taking a system down because they had to with little no thought to the business needs for that system?  With all of the talk of governance and the business value of IT and other rambling nonsense, it's nice to see a CIO who realizes that it can be simple things that can make a difference.  And doing these basic little things can build a great deal of credibility with the rest of the organization.