“BCP is DR right” — It will amaze you how little people who work in IT, know about IT.

“BCP is DR right” — It will amaze you how little people who work in IT, know about IT. And acronyms are to blame

Acronyms are a plague causing never-ending misery on society. It is that bad. Social media is awash with YOLOs and SMDHs and such and, yes yes, everyone loves to use them. So, to avoid offending the sensitive types, let me narrow it to acronyms in the corporate world. They are a flat out abomination. And, what’s worse, in the corporate world they are everywhere. Products are acronyms, services are acronyms, team names are acronyms, roles are acronyms, processes are acronyms, systems are acronyms, customers are acronyms. And these are just the organisational level acronyms. Go down lower to a specialty, say Marketing, you’ll find specialist acronyms like ToFu, MoFu, BoFu and CTAs. Yep, they’re a proper plague.

Why oh why? Well acronyms are used to save time by shortening wordy phrases like “Business Continuity Planning” down to a succinct series of letters, i.e. “BCP”. And it makes sense right, I can say and type “BCP” much faster than I can say or write “Business Continuity Planning”, so it is a complete time saver! Except it is not. And, worse, it creates significant confusion in organisations because no one has any clue what they mean.

First — when do acronyms actually work? Acronyms can work for physical objects — something you can see, eg an ATM. Here, the representation of the object in your brain can be tied to the acronym, making it easy to remember. So the physical object becomes the acronym ATM. Whenever referenced in the future, the recall is effortless. Job well done for acronyms. Time saved. When don’t they work? Almost all other times.

What about the “time-saving”? Non-physical acronyms are remembered by creating an encoding in the brain between the acronym and the full description. It’s why they’re so hard to learn initially. They require repetition for most people for them to stick. And the saturation levels need to be so high for them to stick for everyone (see “AWS”) that they’re near impossible to reach for 99.99% of use cases. For those acronyms that don’t achieve the heights of “AWS” and become a “thing”, for people to make effective use of the acronym later, there is a mental decoding process to go through each and every time they encounter the acronym — they need to translate it back to the complete phrase to be able to process it. Therefore, for it to be useful, “BCP” needs to become “Business Continuity Planning” in the brain each and every time. And this is a significant overhead on the consumer. Want proof? Try to catch yourself doing it next time you read an acronym in the article. See how slow your thought process becomes and how disruptive is it. So, when it is the abstract scenario, it is clearly a time waster, not a time saver.

“But wait! What about the writer/speaker? It is a time saver for them!” Well, when speaking, you’re using long vowel sounds for each letter to sound out the acronym — “Bee See Pee” — so, it is quicker, but not that much quicker. Writing? Sure, it is quicker to write. But, the question is, what is the point of conveying any kind of information in the first place? Who is information for — the creator or the audience? If the audience has to decode you message to understand it, are you a good communicator? And audiences are often multiple in number, rather than a creator who is singular. So a short time saving for the creator would be more than offset by the penalty incurred on the audience. The creator may believe that high exposure will lessen the mental overhead and, eventually, the audience will not need to translate it. Nope. They’ll still translate it each time — unless they don’t actually know what it means…

And this is the crux of the issue. When we use an acronym, it overlooks the fact that there is definition in the words themselves that is useful, which is lost when you use an acronym. “BCP” does not mean anything — it is just 3 capital letters after all. The meaning comes from full phrase “Business Continuity Planning”. If you heard “BCP” and were asked to define it, without knowing anything else, you wouldn’t be able to. It’s not a word after all. There is no definition. But if you’re asked to define what “Business Continuity Planning” is, even if you had never heard of it before, you’d hazard a guess that it was something to do with Planning for Continuity of the Business. Amazingly, you’d be right.

So if acronyms are not time savers and confuse rather than clarify, why are they so prevalent in the corporate world, but especially in IT? Simple. They’re both a literal and figurative codeword. A secret handshake between those in the know, while making it easy to identify those who don’t. Don’t know what SNAT in F5 is? Well the Network guys won’t give you the time of day. Don’t know your SAMLs from your OAuths, well the Identity guys will cackle while you try to pretend you know the difference. Don’t know your REST from your SOAP, well Integration peeps won’t sit with you at lunch. And this “secret club membership” is the reason why IT people love acronyms. Even if it makes your job harder…

So why the title of the article “BCP is DR, right?” Well, as usual, a story. At one of the stops in my career, I managed a part of the business that delivered a cloud-based software solution to customers. To guarantee availability of the software, it was deployed in a HA/DR topology. What does that mean? HA means “Highly available”, i.e. making sure the availability of the software was really, really high (you do this by ensuring no single point of failures exist). DR means “Disaster Recovery”, ie if a disaster occurred at our providers main data centre, then we had everything ready to go at a backup data centre and just needed to flick a switch to turn it on. (See how easy it is with the actual words!)

When trying to win new business, customers will often ask to see your “Business Continuity Plan”. They want to know that you have a “Plan” for the “Continuity” of the “Business” in the event of a catastrophic event, eg a COVID pandemic, or a flood, or the office building was destroyed. So a new customer did their due diligence and asked for a copy of our companies BCP plan. The owner of the plan itself is normally the COO, but commonly delegated to a low-level role, like Facilities Manager, which ours was. So the Facilities Manager was tasked with providing the BCP. It was his job to maintain it after all.

The Facilities Manager, who was a nice guy, approached me and asked “I need to provide our BCP to a customer. I don’t have one but I hear you do. Can I have a copy?” I clarified that I didn’t have a BCP. “I think you do. Your software has DR, doesn’t it?” I confirmed it does. “Well, BCP is DR, right?” I spent the next hour explaining to the guy whose actual job it was to know our BCP on what BCP actually was. This is what happens when everything said has no meaning. No one knows what to do. You just get to be in a secret club.

So what is the lesson today? Simple, don’t use acronyms. Ever. Have to write it a term a lot? Copy and paste is fast, so is find and replace — be that better version of yourself. Come to think of it, I should probably put this sentence at the top of the article with TL;DR. SMDH.