Acronyms gone wild

Georgina Swan

Georgina Swan is the Editor of CIO.

The silly season is upon us!

Yes, it’s almost Christmas – a time when Australians dig out their Christmas lights and swap ‘snow’ for ‘glow’, when office party shenanigans are rife and our thoughts turn more to celebration than innovation. The pollies all go on holidays, TV turns decidedly desultory and we look back at the highs and lows of 2011.

With that in mind, this post is hardly high-brow. In honour of the silly season, we are celebrating the acronym.

The IT industry certainly doesn't have the monopoly on wacky acronyms — it has some tough competition from government departments — but it does come up with some corkers.

iWAP

One of my favourites doing the rounds among the CIOs at the moment, for example, is iWAP. Short for ‘I want a pony’ this acronym is perfect for describing whatever pet project the CEO has come up with — often having spent some time in the airport lounge and digesting the latest vendor-driven marketing hype.

iWAP has become a favourite office in-joke of ours and I began thinking: What acronyms do other organisations use, in jest or otherwise? And what else can we come up with?

I consulted the Zeitgeist oracle – Twitter – to find out. Here are some of your suggestions.

TADIS

From @vbthedog: TADIS The name used by the WA Police for its network and database. The word is that the Commissioner is a Dr Who fan, but unlike the Doctor’s ‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’ machine, the WA Police TADIS stands for ‘Tasking and Data Information System’.

ITIL madness

A few of you also pointed out the acronym atrocities perpetuated in the name of the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL). I particularly liked this contribution from Ivanka Menken:

SKMS, incorporating the CMS and CMDB, but not the CDB

For those of us who don’t speak ITIL, this translates to ‘service knowledge management system’ and it incorporates the ‘configuration management system’ and the ‘configuration management database’ but not the ‘constant database’. Yikes! As Karen Ferris noted, the acronym department is very busy over at ITIL headquarters.

Keeping with the ITIL theme, Roy Atkinson is onto a winner with FUTIL — ‘failure to utilise technology infrastructure libraries’. Call me geeky, but this one is my personal favourite.

EaaS

I also like Roman Tarnavski’s EaaS — everything-as-a-service. Great for vendors who are no longer quite sure how their offering fits in the market, but still want to jump on the Cloud computing bandwagon!

ITYFI

And I love this tweet from Rex Malabar: “Well at my company we often hear the IT guy say ITYFI, short for "I think you f#*ked it.”

ISDN

Brian Williams’ contributions also had me chuckling:

NUTS — no understanding of technology solutions ISDN — innovation subscribers don't need

PEBKAC

And @caseyjohnellis suggested the perennially funny PEBKAC — problem exists between keyboard and chair.

Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments below — just keep it clean ;)

Merry Christmas everybody!

Tags: acronyms, Christmas