Idioms of Business & Technology English

Multiple Meanings

Posted in Education, Language, English by premiumenglish on December 7th, 2007

This episode of Idioms of Business & Technology focuses on three words that I hear used over and over again in both business and technology settings but these words have multiple, distinct meanings. I hope to provide the context you will need to tell which meaning was intended.

The first word is “client”.

In the context of providing professional services such as legal advice, accounting, or technology consulting, a “client” is the person or company that is paying for the services provided. A client may be someone who asks a lawyer to prepare their will, a business executive that hires an auditor, or a business executive that hires a management consultant to improve a manufacturer’s supply chain operations.
In the context of computer software, a “client” is a software program which requests information or service from another program. In this case the other program plays the role of “server” in that it serves the client. You may also hear the phrase “client/server architecture” which describes a relationship between a client (or potentially many clients) and a centralized server.
In the context of one of the most popular corporate software packages in the world, SAP, a “client” is also a computer security concept in which several companies can run on a single SAP installation using the same database hardware. When users log into SAP they must specify which “client” they want to log into. SAP makes sure that no data from one client is mixed up with the data from another client. This practice originally started because of a business practice which began as our first example of a client, that of someone who hires professional services firm. A “client” hired a company to provide SAP software to them as a service. The services firm sold services to many clients and ran them all on the same database. The concept of specifying an SAP client when a user logged onto the system provided a way to keep one client’s users from seeing data belonging to another client.

The next word I would like to discuss is the verb “engage” or its noun form “engagement”. There is also the adjective “engaged”.

In our personal life, to become “engaged” usually means that a woman has accepted a man’s proposal to get married. It would also apply if the woman asks the man and he accepts. In either case, the man and the woman are “engaged” from the time both agree until the marriage takes place. The period of time between becoming engaged and the time of the marriage is the “engagement” period. A couple who is engaged for 12 months is said to have had a 12 month engagement.
Another commonly used use of the verb “engage” is to devote attention to someone such as “He was engaged in a serious conversation with his boss.”
A slight variation on this would be the military use of the phrase to “engage the enemy” which would mean to confront the enemy directly.
In the business world, people often use the word “engaged” to mean taking an issue or problem very seriously. Often it is used in a negative way to ask if someone who should take an issue seriously really is. For example, “Is the Vice President of Marketing engaged on this customer service issue?” or “The Vice President is not engaged at all.”
Earlier in this episode we mentioned the hiring of a professional services firm. Often the project that consultants are working on or the contract that consultants work under is called an “engagement”. For example, a technology consultant might say to another “I am working on an engagement with XYZ Company to determine the requirements for their new supply chain software.”

The last word for this episode is “abstract” or “abstraction.” These are popular words in the areas of software design and management consulting.

To most people “abstract” is a way to describe modern art in which the painter or sculptor does not represent the subject as we see it with our physical eyes but presents lines, shapes, and colors in an interesting or thought provoking way.
Sometimes people use abstract to imply something is difficult to understand such as an “abstract idea.”
In software or consulting, an “abstraction” is something which pulls together essential concepts or data or system behavior in a way that helps facilitate discussion on an important topic. This is a paradox compared to the previous thought that something abstract is hard to understand. In consulting, abstractions are used to make something easier to understand. For example, a business concept such as a “customer” could be considered an abstraction if there are many different kinds of customers such as an individual, a small business, a government organization, a non-profit organization, or a large corporation. Even employees can be customers thru the popular employee purchase programs. All these customer types have common attributes such as names, addresses, and preferred methods of payment. Using the customer abstraction allows the conversation to focus on what is common while ignoring the fact that a non-profit needs a tax exemption certificate number or that a large corporation may lease instead of purchase or that an employee may receive an employee discount. In these cases it would be appropriate to call “customer” an abstraction while an “individual” and a “large corporation” are called “concrete” examples the customer abstraction.

This episode was pretty intense. I hope you learned something that will assist you in your work. Thanks again for subscribing to Idioms of Business and Technology!

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