Chris DeVault remembers the surprise he felt as a hotshot young engineer when he was told that he needed to write better memos if he wanted to advance his career.

"My boss told me I was a bright young guy with a great future, but I had to learn to be a better communicator," says DeVault, who is now managing principal of the mid-Atlantic region for Internosis (an IT consultancy), with responsibilities that include running IT. DeVault’s boss, Internosis CEO Robert Stalick, told him that his memos were filled with technical jargon that meant nothing to the nontechnology executives who read them. Stalick added that 80 percent of what makes a memo work is its attention to the needs of its readers.

Mastering the seemingly mundane art of writing memorandums might not seem like a career advancer, but in fact, memos remain the key way of communicating within companies, even in these days of videoconferencing and webcasts. While memos are often sent electronically now, they’re still the way companies communicate strategies, directives, meeting results and employee performance. Memos are particularly important in large companies or departments with people at multiple locations.

DeVault’s boss was right to emphasize the reader, say business writing consultants. While finer points such as writing in the active voice and using outlining to help organize thoughts are useful, "what’s really important for the CIO or anyone else is to tailor their communications to their reader," says Barry Eckhouse, professor in the School of Economics and Business Administration at St. Mary’s College of California and author of several books on business writing and communications. Usually, he says, memos are "oriented toward the sender and the sender’s interest."

That’s a huge mistake for any executive to make, but in particular CIOs, because of the historical rift between the languages of IT and business. Poor memos can cause business-side executives to turn down project and budget requests if they aren’t framed in a way that shows the value for the business, or they assume too much knowledge on the part of readers.

"Too often, CIOs have as the subject of a memo [something like] ’New Laptops,’" says Eric Brown, founder of Communication Associates. The memo will go on to say that laptops are desperately needed and will cite the cost—but won’t explain why they are needed. So its message will be ignored. "CIOs don’t get the laptops, and they wonder why," he says.

Brown says it’s because many IT people fail to consider the purpose of the memo, which should be to offer a solution to a business problem. In this case, the point is not that the company needs new laptops; rather, it might be that the company needs to address why it’s been losing sales. If, for example, the existing laptops no longer connect well with corporate systems—and therefore salespeople can’t give the same information to potential customers as their rivals can—then a technology upgrade could have a direct impact on the company’s profitability. (See "Before," on this page and "After," on Page 87, to see how Brown helped one CIO successfully rewrite just such a memo.