Just Say No to Technology Acronym Abuse

Information technology suffers from a bad case of acronym abuse thanks to the rampant overuse of these abbreviations which are formed from parts of a word or phrase. A familiar example is DOS (disk operating system). Acronyms can help make communications easier, but are also a well-known source of confusion, and in worst-case scenarios hinder productivity. This happens because people may not be familiar with an acronym, and it is human nature not to ask questions out of fear that one might appear uninformed. This is usually discovered after a problem arises.

Here is a hypothetical example. ABC Industries is a rapidly growing company involved in both design and manufacturing. ABC has multiple locations around the world, as well as partners and contractors. All of these locations are networked together, and collaborate on a regular basis.

Since both design and manufacturing are core competencies of ABC, they utilize the latest computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing (CAM) technology. ABC's products are sophisticated, and their corresponding design and manufacturing files are large. This created a challenge related to sharing these files with other locations, including those outside of the corporate firewall.

At first, users tried to leverage existing infrastructure such as emailing design files or utilizing file transfer protocol solutions (FTP), but discovered that the files were too big for email, varying network quality caused FTP sessions to timeout and sometimes cause corruption, and the lack of version control meant that nobody really knew who had the latest version of a file. This became especially stressful as deadlines approached.

Realizing that existing infrastructure was not going to work, the team got together and started to research solutions, which is when the acronyms, and confusion started to appear. They had CAD/CAM systems in-house that could also be considered CAE (computer aided engineering) or maybe it should all be referred to as CAx. It looked like they could benefit from either a PLM (product lifecycle management) system or a PDM (product data management) system to ease their file sharing and collaboration challenges, and to improve their connectivity a WAN (wide area network) accelerator should be considered. All of these solutions had benefits, were costly and complex, and required a level of investment they determined was prohibitive.

Increase Project Success Rates by Avoiding Confusion From Acronym Abuse

Fortunately, the team recognized that vendor related spin, acronyms and technical jargon were only making things more complex and driving up potential solution costs. So they went back to the basics and simplified requirements as much as possible with no jargon and no acronyms. Here is a plain language example:

• Project team members need to share, edit and maintain up-to-date files at multiple locations without worrying about version conflicts and file corruption

• Power users need files available locally to maximize their productivity and should not have to depend on files stored at a central location on another continent

• Any solution must be efficient with network utilization and resilient due to the varying quality of network connectivity between locations, including occasional outages

• Must support multiple file types from multiple software vendors including design files and Office

• Solution needs to be affordable both internally and to external partners and contractors

• Solution should leverage existing infrastructure and not require additional hardware

Now, do these requirements sound familiar? Chances are your organization faces similar challenges no matter how large or small. Visit our CAD file collaboration solutions page to see how Peer has solved project and design collaboration challenges for leading automotive, architecture, engineering, aerospace and national security organizations and agencies around the world, and can solve them for you as well.