Acronyms

Have you noticed that in the world today there are so many acronyms and you almost need a dictionary just to keep track of all of them. Could you imagine the size of the dictionary that would be required for the acronyms. Even with the various ones I see through IT it would be rather large.

When it comes to acronyms the challenge is that the same two or three letters can be used for a bunch of different things. We ran into a situation a while ago with one simple acronym meaning something that we didn't expect in the IT world. Now the one I am talking about is DC. No I am not talking about the District of Columbia in the states but three different meanings in IT that I know of.

• DC = direct current, domain controller and data centre

That is only one of the many different acronyms that I have found that in IT there can be more than one meaning depending on who you are talking to. What gets me is when people throw in the various acronyms thinking that the person they are talking to understands the term they are meaning. We have been in many different conversations and of course I had a different meaning of the acronym then the person saying it meant.

When you are writing and using the acronyms especially in a document or email, it is very important to define the term and show the acronym, after the term, at the beginning of your document. This ensures that everyone has the same meaning that you are intending them to be thinking of. In the case of DC it was used in an entire document without it being defined and it took us the longest time to realize they were talking about Data Centre as we had never head DC used that way before.

If you are going to use acronyms please make sure that the people that are getting the message will know what abbreviation you are using. Even if you are in the same industry remember that the meaning that you are using may not be the one that the receive is thinking of.