Information technology (IT) managers find it challenging to communicate with business managers about IT. Immersed in technical descriptions, finding a shared language to effectively describe how IT, particularly a new technology, creates value for the organization can be a demanding task. The extant literature recommends avoiding a technical language (TL) but suggests nomenclatures, i.e., sets of language concepts, that are mainly based on inspired creativity and trial-and-error design processes rather than a careful construction and verification of such prescriptions. Without theories that support their constructions, IT descriptions produced using those nomenclatures suffer from poor expressiveness, i.e., concept deficit or excess. Without theories that explain how those nomenclatures influence effectiveness and without empirical verification supporting their effectiveness with high internal validity, the observed effectiveness of nomenclatures can be attributed to features other than the nomenclature, such as, the characteristics of the provider and tone of the IT description. The purpose of this prescriptive paper is to a) devise theory-based nomenclatures to be used to describe value created by an IT resource, b) provide theoretical explanations that answer how nomenclatures influence effectiveness, and c) compare the effectiveness of the devised nomenclatures. Using the literature on strategic management, this paper develops two nomenclatures using the theories of the resource-based view and the capability-based view, called resource-based language (RbL) and capability-based language (CbL), respectively. The paper draws on theories such as network memory theory, semantic distance theory, working memory theory, and argumentation theory to explain how a nomenclature works on memory and compare the effectiveness of the prescribed nomenclatures. The experiment conducted corroborates the predicted comparative effectiveness of the nomenclatures, i.e., CbL > RbL > TL. Moreover, while the results generally support the theoretical explanation based on these theories, they also highlight some limitations of those explanations
