Humour

The jargon factory

T A Balasubramanian writes how TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms) give great power to the average IT vendor because they make buyers meek and submissive

Many years ago, before Bill Gates started Microsoft, when computers were first sold commercially, it was understood that you had some control over the thing called a computer. Computers and computer software were relatively expensive, so the computer vendor was a behemoth (like IBM or Tandem) who could afford to employ thousands of people, a vast majority of these being marketing people. They had a great job, inventing new things to do with computers so that the average corporate star-gazers who wanted to be progressive would buy more computers.

If you had the skills, you could, with some patience, make a computer do things with data, automatically. This was obviously good because you could dispense with battalions of staff and get the computer to do all the adding up for you. It used to be called data processing, or DP for short. DP may be accused of being the first of a torrent that has been pouring out from a veritable jargon factory ever since.

One of the first products from the assembly line was the TLA. For those who may be new to his game, TLA is a way of making something sound newer, sexier, brawnier, better and more mysterious than something you already know about. It is also invariably costlier, but nobody ever talks about that because you need it to survive.

You can obscure what it really is by making up some abbreviations that suggest power, new technology, great advances in human understanding and more bang for the byte. Most elderly IT folks dread the TLA because it makes them feel that they are obviously out of their depth and hopelessly behind the times. It gives a great whip to the average IT vendor because it makes IT buyers meek and submissive. And incidentally, TLA stands for Three-Letter Acronym, before this becomes too mystifying even for this column.

TLAs successfully generate fear, uncertainty and doubt, which has, of course become the foundational TLA called FUD. Some of the most popular (or dreadful, depending on which side of the sales counter you are on) TLAs are: CPU, ALU, FDD, ROM, ECC, GNU, DOS, SQL, FTP, XML, 4GL, BSD, EDI and CMM. Of course, users have decided to give their own spin to TLAs. One version of XML, for example, is that it is Extra-Medium-Large, the clothing size between “medium-large” and “large”. Sometimes innovative vendors get completely carried away and acronyms like SSADM, DASD, CASE, CORBA and OO were invented, which broke all rules because they did not have three letters.

One of the turning points in acronym evolution was the metamorphosis of data processing which had begun to sound boring, mechanical, and tactical, into information technology, or IT, which began to sound exciting, even strategic.

TLA evolution, just like DNA and Darwinian evolution, is driven by survival needs. The trouble with TLAs on their own is that they do not create vision. To sell more computers and software, the marketing people, (who are always challenged, like many wild creatures, to innovate, innovate and innovate, or perish), need to create new visions. Some may add that, under pressure to innovate, they actually do not create visions but revisions, since the world’s most popular marketing strategy is to repackage old technology in a new wrapping of delightful TLAs, then pretend to call the wrapping the new vision. Incidentally, the total number of these beasties available in the English alphabet, using only upper case letters, is 26³, or a staggering 17,576 possible TLAs.

Since the vast majority of TLAs were becoming too obscure, they had to be upgraded to RPs (short for Revisionary Phrases, not Railway Passes). A good example of a Revisionary Phrase is Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, which luckily is also a TLA. It has been so mystically marketed that you are made to feel that your organisation will roll up and melt unless you shoot some ERP into its ageing veins right now.

Never mind if what you really needed was some modest integration between your distribution system and the accounts system, you will gladly throw away all of your existing investment and implement an ERP package from Planet Otherwise because it sounds so good in the PDF brochures and PPT presentations, you come to believe that it might solve every one of your problems, including indigestion.

For some, it does. For others it does not because they simply cannot make the changes to their business processes that new software often requires. This irritates the TLA-spouting revisionary marketing guys because customers who will not or cannot change their business processes to match the vendor’s own super-duper software do not qualify as sexy new reference sites for the next sale.

Another very fertile area for Revisionary Phrases is what used to be called Management Information, or Decision Support. Basically getting operational data into shape so that you can run reports for management on it, or use it to help you make decisions about your business. This has come to be known as Data Warehousing, along with a whole skip-load of other phrases like Data Mart, Data Mining, Data Ensemble and Data Exploration.

The thing about Revisionary Phrases is that most people can imagine what is meant by them without having to get into a lot of detail. They also work well for vendor marketing departments because they imply a solution, also without having to go into a lot of detail. The phrases mean different things to different people, so marketing can address a wider audience than if they were more specific. When it proves to be more difficult to implement the solution than was at first apparent, marketing just upgrades the revision, so it becomes a re-revision. Data Warehousing does not deliver? You need a Federated Data Architecture (equals more servers and more software licences). Federated Data Architecture not working? You need Distributed Virtual Data Warehousing with a Data Exploration Hub. Of course, companies now need armies of staff just to keep up with the latest acronyms and marketing visions. And they are a lot more expensive than the old clerical staff.

So where is this jargon going? Here’s a prediction: the next big thing in IT—and this is a secret new project that is backed by all the major vendors—will be Distributed Axial Binary Boolean Applications, which, in the future, will be religiously marketed as DABBA.

Which, by the way is a VLFLA, or a Very Long Five-Letter Abbreviation.