Digital Translators

Digital Translators 09/30/2009

I have seen the expression on so many faces over the past fifteen years. Confused, but too embarassed, or even worse, too scared to ask.
   So many a media manager, editor, journalist, copy-editor, marketing guru, ad sales rep, and company MD or CEO or Financial Director, have sat around a board room meeting with me and other digital types with no comprehension of the technical language flying between the four walls, in the numerous slick Powerpoint presentations and tabulated in the new digital business plans.
   Sometimes it is so blatantly obvious that the people that need to make very important decisions on new digital strategies do not have the faintest idea of what the demands were going to be on their staff and the culture of their business. But they are just too confused (and embarassed) to ask the very basic questions in order to get up to speed.
   Being a journalist myself and not a technical expert on all things digital at the time I know that feeling of anxiety when things are not as clear as it used to be before the "IT people" were invited into the board rooms to tell us where the world is heading. I have learned since - you just have to ask the questions and understand this new world or else you get left behind very quickly. That was 15 years ago when the World Wide Web was the buzz all around town.
   Today it is the "engineers" and "developers" - all more or less the short side of 25 years old - that occupy the board rooms. Their digital jargon is even more unintelligible to the management types. They are miles apart. In fact, they are worlds, universes apart in many ways. And often they are employees within the same company. The digital divide runs deep even within one company.
   So many businesses need someone to "translate" that jargon for them. That "translation process" starts long before the first meeting with the developers to make sure that management have some sort of a basic grip on the new environment they are supposed to enter. Then you must ensure that there are "interpreters" present in the meeting to guide management through the Powerpoint presentation. That is an art in itself.
   And afterwards you have a "private" meeting with management to explain all the implications of the decisions they have made in the board room meeting.
   You either smile when you read this because you have experienced this board room scene at least once before, or you nod your head in agreement with the scenario, because that is exactly how you feel about the current situation in your own business and the pressure you are under to do something "digital" fast, but you don't quite know how to make sense of all the proposals and options.
   The good news is that there are "translators" and "interpreters" around - people like us who have made the transition over time and now span the divide. We are not Digital Immigrants anymore (after at least fifteen years at the forefront of the digital revolution), but don't fit the definition of Digital Natives either (simply because of our date of birth, pre-1980). Call us Digital Translators.
    Yes, maybe we won't come up with the next Facebook or Twitter or Whatever, but we shall be the first to adopt it, learn to understand the application, apply it in different environments and even figure out, eventually, how to make money from it.
    And we shall be ready to guide some of the slower adopters and companies through the Next New Thing which threatens to make their businesses obsolete.

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