Translating IT Speak – When IT leaders communicate in technical terms, they unintentionally signal that they’re still individual contributors wearing a manager’s title. Executives hear acronyms, infrastructure details, and project status — and they disengage. The result: smaller budgets, lower priority, and less influence when it matters most.

According to research by McKinsey & Company, technology leaders who align IT strategy with business value are significantly more likely to deliver above-average returns. Business-language fluency isn’t about dumbing things down — it’s about translating complex work into the terms decision-makers use every day.

When you communicate in business terms, three things shift: you gain credibility as a leader (not just a technologist), you unlock budget and prioritization conversations, and you start shaping strategy instead of just executing it.

Mini-Story: The Before

Marcus had just been promoted to IT Manager. In his first quarterly review, he led with: “We resolved 94% of P2 incidents within SLA, deployed 14 patches, and our mean time to recover improved to 47 minutes.” The CFO nodded politely. The COO asked if IT was planning to hire more people. Marcus walked out without the $120K infrastructure budget he needed. The executives hadn’t connected his metrics to anything they cared about. He had reported activities, not outcomes — and no one in the room understood why any of it mattered to the business.

The Three Layers of Executive Communication

Every executive update you give should work at three levels simultaneously. Miss any one of them and you’ll lose the room.

1. Outcomes: Connect to What Executives Measure

Executives are measured on revenue growth, cost efficiency, risk management, and customer experience. Your first sentence in any update should anchor to one of these four areas. “We upgraded the database server” is an activity. “We reduced the risk of a customer-facing outage that could cost $50K per hour” is an outcome.

2. Trade-Offs: Be Honest About What You’re Not Doing

Executives know you can’t do everything. What they need to understand is what you’re deprioritizing and what risk that creates. “If we focus on the CRM integration in Q3, the legacy migration will shift to Q4 — which extends our compliance exposure by 90 days” is the kind of statement that builds trust and invites a real conversation.

3. Proof: Use Simple Metrics and Trends

One metric, clearly trending. That’s all you need. Executives don’t want a dashboard — they want a signal. Check out ITIL’s guidance on service measurement for a framework on selecting the right indicators. A simple “Our mean time to recover improved from 4.2 hours to 1.8 hours over 90 days, reducing per-incident cost from $22K to $9K” tells a compelling story in two sentences.

Speaking the Language of Business: Your Translation Framework

Use this five-step structure every time you need to communicate an IT initiative, request, or risk to non-technical stakeholders:

1. Problem — What is the business problem, not the technical symptom?
2. Impact — What is the current or potential cost (revenue, risk, customer, operations)?
3. Options — What are 2–3 realistic paths forward (including the “do nothing” option)?
4. Recommendation — What do you recommend, and why?
5. Next Step — What specific action, by whom, by when?

This structure keeps your communication decisive, businesslike, and easy for executives to respond to. You’re not just raising problems — you’re driving decisions.

Mini-Story: The After

Six months later, Marcus tried again. He opened with: “Our order management system is running on hardware that hasn’t been supported since 2022. Based on current failure rates, there’s a 40% chance of an unplanned outage in the next 12 months — and every hour of downtime costs the business roughly $35K in lost orders and customer support calls. I have three options for you: a full replacement at $220K, a hybrid approach at $140K, or a temporary maintenance contract at $60K that buys us 18 months. My recommendation is the hybrid approach, which balances risk reduction with capital efficiency. I need a go or no-go by March 15 to hit our Q2 target.” The CFO leaned forward and asked two questions. Marcus had his budget approved before the meeting ended.

Business-to-IT Translation Table

Use this table to translate common IT work into the language your executives speak.

Business Concern	What It Really Means	IT Translation	Example Metric
We need more budget	Why should we spend money?	Reducing unplanned downtime will protect $2M in weekly revenue	Availability % / MTTR
System performance is degrading	Customers are complaining; are we losing sales?	Page load > 3s increases cart abandonment by 7%. We need $40K to resolve it	Apdex score, conversion rate
Legacy system end-of-life	Is our infrastructure obsolete?	Vendor support ends Q3. Running unsupported software creates compliance and breach risk	CVSS scores, audit findings
We’re adopting DevSecOps	What does that even mean?	We’re embedding security into every release so vulnerabilities are caught before go-live, not after	Mean time to remediate (MTTR)
Cloud migration project	Will this cost more?	Migrating 12 apps will reduce hosting cost by $180K/yr and cut provisioning from 3 weeks to 2 hours	Cloud unit cost, lead time
Network capacity upgrade	We had no issues last quarter	Current utilisation is at 87%. One traffic spike away from an outage that could halt operations for 4+ hours	Network utilisation %, SLA breach risk
Security awareness training	We already have antivirus	83% of breaches involve human error (Verizon DBIR). Training cuts phishing click-through by 60%	Phishing simulation fail rate
Helpdesk ticket backlog	Support is slow — is headcount the answer?	2,000 open tickets = 400+ hours of employee lost productivity per week. Automation can clear 40%	Ticket volume, avg resolution time
MFA rollout	Why can’t people just use passwords?	Stolen credentials cause 80% of hacking incidents. MFA blocks 99% of automated attacks (Microsoft research)	MFA adoption %, account compromises
Data governance program	We have enough policies	Poor data quality costs U.S. businesses $3.1T/yr (IBM). Governance ensures analytics and AI are trustworthy	Data quality score, reporting accuracy
Disaster recovery test	We’ve never had a disaster	The question isn’t if — it’s when and how fast we recover. Last test showed RTO of 18 hrs vs 4-hr SLA	RTO, RPO, test pass/fail
API integration project	IT loves acronyms	Connecting our CRM to our ERP eliminates 200 hours of manual data entry per month and reduces order errors	Hours saved, error rate

Metrics That Move Executives: Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

Most IT teams report lagging indicators — metrics that tell you what already happened (incidents, tickets closed, patch compliance). These matter, but on their own they’re backward-looking. Leading indicators predict future outcomes and are far more powerful in an executive conversation.

A leading indicator is a metric that signals what is likely to happen — like rising error rates before a system outage, or increasing phishing click-through rates before a breach. A lagging indicator tells you what already happened — like total downtime hours or the number of security incidents last quarter. Find more on building meaningful IT metrics at ITLeadershipHub: Metrics That Matter.

Avoid Vanity Metrics

A vanity metric looks impressive but doesn’t connect to business outcomes. “99.7% uptime” sounds great — but executives don’t know if that 0.3% downtime happened at 2 a.m. on a Saturday or during peak trading hours. Always add context: “99.7% uptime, with zero outages during business hours. The two incidents we had were resolved in under 20 minutes, avoiding an estimated $14K in lost revenue.”

Practical Metric Examples by Domain

• Reliability: MTTR (Mean Time to Recover), SLA adherence %, customer-impact hours
• Security: Phishing simulation fail rate, CVSS score trend, time to patch critical vulnerabilities
• Delivery speed: Deployment frequency, lead time to change, change failure rate
• Support: First-contact resolution rate, employee productivity hours lost, cost per ticket

How to Talk About Risk, Cost, and Value Without the Jargon

Risk: Be Factual, Not Fearful

When you talk about cyber risk, compliance, or downtime, resist the urge to catastrophise. Executives tune out fear — they respond to evidence. Use a simple formula: Likelihood × Impact. For example: “Ransomware attacks on companies our size increased 67% last year (Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report). Our current backup posture would mean 6–8 hours of downtime if we were hit, costing approximately $210K in lost productivity and recovery. A $35K investment in immutable backups reduces that window to under 2 hours.”

For compliance risk, reference the standard directly. NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework and ISO 27001 give you a credible, non-vendor-specific benchmark to cite in executive conversations.

Cost: Run vs. Change, and Unit Economics

Executives think about IT cost in two buckets: run cost (keeping the lights on) and change cost (building new capabilities). Be explicit about which bucket you’re in. Cloud spend is especially prone to confusion — instead of “our AWS bill is $48K/month,” say “our cloud unit cost is $1.20 per active user per day, down from $1.90 twelve months ago — a 37% efficiency improvement.”

Review AWS Cloud Financial Management guidance or Google Cloud’s FinOps practices to build unit-cost models that resonate with finance teams.

Value: Make the Invisible Visible

IT often delivers value that no one notices — until something breaks. Make the value explicit and recurring in your updates. Examples: automation that saves 200 hours per month at a loaded cost of $85/hr = $17K/month in recoverable productivity; an improved checkout flow that reduced abandonment by 3 percentage points, adding $600K to annual revenue; an MDM rollout that cut device provisioning from 2 days to 2 hours per new hire.

See our article on IT Business Value Communication for more examples and templates.

Stakeholder Mapping: What Each Executive Actually Cares About

One message doesn’t fit all. Adapt your frame based on who’s in the room.

Stakeholder	Core Concerns	How to Frame IT Work
CFO	Cost, ROI, budget efficiency, cash flow risk	Frame IT in CapEx vs OpEx, unit cost per user/transaction, payback period
COO	Operational uptime, process efficiency, headcount productivity	Lead with SLAs, automation gains, hours saved, and incident impact on ops
CISO	Cyber risk, compliance, third-party risk	Quantify risk exposure (likelihood × impact), show control coverage, regulatory alignment
Chief Product Officer	Release velocity, quality, feature delivery	Show deployment frequency, lead time to change, defect escape rate, CI/CD health
Head of Sales	CRM uptime, lead data quality, deal velocity	Tie IT reliability directly to rep productivity and pipeline conversion rates

For a deeper dive on stakeholder alignment, see Stakeholder Management for IT Leaders and Vendor Risk Management.

Do / Don’t: Executive IT Updates

✓ DO

• Open with the business outcome, not the technical activity.
• State the risk in dollar or time terms executives understand.
• Offer 2–3 options with a clear recommendation — don’t just raise problems.
• Use one key metric per initiative; more is noise.
• Quantify trade-offs: “If we delay X, we accept Y risk for Z weeks.”
• Bring a one-page brief for complex topics, not a 40-slide deck.
• Acknowledge what you don’t know — credibility beats false confidence.
• Follow up in writing within 24 hours after verbal briefings.
• Tie every request back to a strategic company objective.
• Use plain analogies: “Our firewall is the lock on the front door.”

✗ DON’T

• Lead with technical details before context or stakes are clear.
• Use unexplained acronyms (SLA, MTTR, CI/CD, WAF) without a one-sentence definition.
• Present problems without proposed solutions.
• Report inputs (hours worked, tickets closed) as the primary success measure.
• Bury the recommendation on page 12 of a status report.
• Use fear-driven language like “We’ll definitely get hacked” without evidence.
• Over-promise SLAs you can’t sustain just to win budget approval.
• Conflate “IT is busy” with “IT is delivering value.”
• Share granular infrastructure metrics executives can’t act on.
• Wait for a crisis to have the business-language conversation.

Executive-Ready IT Update Checklist

Before you walk into any executive meeting or send any leadership communication, run through this list:

• ☐  Identified the business outcome this update is tied to
• ☐  Translated technical work into impact (revenue, risk, cost, or CX)
• ☐  Included one lead metric and one lagging metric
• ☐  Defined all acronyms on first use
• ☐  Stated the trade-off or what we’re NOT doing
• ☐  Framed risk with likelihood × impact, not just likelihood
• ☐  Presented 2–3 options with a clear recommendation
• ☐  Quantified the “do nothing” cost or risk
• ☐  Kept the executive summary to one page or five minutes verbal
• ☐  Identified the stakeholder(s) who care most and tailored the frame
• ☐  Removed jargon or provided plain-English definitions
• ☐  Followed the Problem → Impact → Options → Recommendation → Next Step structure
• ☐  Confirmed the next step has an owner and a due date
• ☐  Tested the message with a non-technical colleague first

Keep this checklist bookmarked alongside our guide to Incident Response Leadership — because how you communicate during an incident is just as critical as how you prevent one.

Building the Business-Language Habit

None of this works if it’s a performance you put on once a quarter. Business-language fluency comes from consistently asking one question about every IT initiative: “So what does this mean for the business?”

Start with a simple habit: every Friday, write three sentences summarising what IT accomplished that week — not in technical terms, but in business terms. Share it with your manager or a business peer. Ask them if it made sense. Their feedback will calibrate your language faster than any training course.

Also consider developing a blameless culture inside your team — because the same transparency and accountability that drives good post-incident reviews also builds the trust that makes business-language communication credible.

For resources on building IT governance and value reporting, the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Harvard Business Review’s CIO resources are excellent non-technical perspectives worth bookmarking.

Conclusion: Three Things to Remember

• Business language is not translation — it’s leadership. When you connect IT to outcomes, you stop being a cost centre and start being a strategic partner.
• Every executive conversation should answer the implicit question: “Why does this matter to us?” Lead with the answer, not the technical backstory.
• Start small. Change one metric in your next update. Reframe one risk in dollar terms. Each small shift builds your credibility — and your influence — over time.