Generation gap

I find it amusing how us older folks seem to have to tweak our vocabulary when dealing with Millennial's. I was in a meeting earlier with a bunch of 20 somethings, when the subject of "systems of record" came up and why, for business, it's important to only keep one version of important information current at one time. I wanted to communicate the idea that centralising data into systems of record is (mainly) so that individuals don't need to spawn their own private copies of information which then become out of date and divergent from the original, i.e. one version of the truth.

As an analogy I talked about how, back in the day, I used to store my negatives in special protective plastic sheets, called "negative files" and that the benefit of this was that you didn't have to have piles of old photos cluttering up the place and potentially getting scratched and creased, you could print whatever size you needed from the negative in pristine form, on-demand. I looked across a field of blank faces for a second before I realised my mistake, none of them knew what a "negative" was...