The Weekly Round-Up: Robot car parks and IT's techno-babble habit

But it seems that business managers are now getting a bit fed up with the IT folk's tendency to mutter about needing some "end-to-end VoIP virtualised cloud doohickeys" whenever they're asked why the accounts system is down again.

Survey of owners

According to a survey of owners and managers at 500 small businesses, IT is the worst offender when it comes to spouting confusing jargon - beating finance, sales and marketing and even HR. Yay! IT finally wins at something. Oh.

Nearly three-quarters of the small business bosses said tech jargon (or as the IT department would have it "ICT gobbledygook solutionising") has got worse in the last five years.

But more than just being an annoyance, the study by Opal, part of TalkTalk Group, found that the use of obscure terminology actually leads businesses to make bad decisions.

More than half of the respondents admitted confusing technical terms (The Round-Up hopes those terms are slightly more obscure that "server" or "internet") have caused them to 'occasionally' make decisions they didn't fully understand, while one in eight said this happened 'regularly'.

And four out of ten business owners admitted to being sold a technical solution they didn't want - or even need - because of overuse of confusing jargon. And an impressive one in eight of these captains of industry said this happened 'frequently'.

Fortunately the majority of business owners seem to be a bit more clued up - eight out of ten said they are put off from scoping out new projects or even speaking to suppliers because they fear confusing jargon during the sell.

One in five said using jargon fosters distrust and shows a lack of understanding of their business needs. And rightly so: read what silicon.com's editor Steve Ranger thinks of the overuse of jargon by IT in his latest Editor's Notebook: Time for IT to break free from the nerd instinct.

And of course if you are fed up with having to decoding industry buzzwords, why not check out silicon.com's series of Cheat Sheets which does the job for you: recent de-jargonising includes Windows Phone 7, cloud computing and the internet of things all explained with nary a "synergising" to be seen.