Not the type of relationship story you’d pay to go see at the movies, but instead of a warm and fuzzy feeling, a successful union between technology and business could pay out in dollars — lots of dollars. How’s that feel?

The relationship does seem kind of one-sided, though. Technology has to do more of the changing — how it speaks, how it thinks, how it delivers? Sound familiar to anyone out there in a relationship? (Weren’t we always told not to try to change someone?)

If the average teenage boy thinks about sex every five minutes, said George Colony, chief executive officer and chairman of Forrester Research at his firm’s Business Technology Forum this week, then the average CEO thinks about higher profit and revenue growth every two minutes. So to get through to them, technology has to start speaking in business terms.

How do you know if it’s business technology-speak, and not just technology speak? Simple. “If your CEO doesn’t understand it, it’s not BT speak.”

In other words, technology people have to learn how to translate:

• open source software;
• lean software;
• cloud computing;
• project oortfolio management;
• business activity monitoring;
• customer business intelligence;
• semantic technology;
• future online customer engagement
• SharePoint 2010; and

into:

• better numbers;
• improved organization;
• higher shareholder value;
• satisfying customers;
• more innovation;
• enhancing the brand;
• improving the world.

Otherwise, Colony said, it’s just “blah blah blah blah blah.”