Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Wednesday 8 October 2008, 7:37 AM
Is this just a load of BSS?
Critics have suggested that creating acronyms just for the sake of it is a blatant marketing ploy to allow vendors to ‘label’ a term in the hope that it will become some sort of de facto standard and possibly benefit from viral web-driven proliferation.
JASA (just another stupid acronym) was apparently first used on Twitter by one Stephen Hay in an exchange focused on POSH (plain old semantic HTML). Hmm, what do you call an acronym within an acronym? Is it a super-acronym maybe? Let’s not go there.
Why do I blog thusly? Well I follow lifecycle management plenty, but I don’t follow the telecoms business with as much devotion. So there I was reading about BSS/OSS and I just thought hang on a minute.
OK it’s hardly rocket science, but BSS/OSS is Business Support Systems / Operations Support Systems and it is an oft-used term if you happen to be talking about fulfillment software for communications service providers.
Hence my web travels led me on a path to connect this type of software to the telecoms industry and read about the companies that work in this space. Convergys and Ceon (actually I think the former just bought the latter and that’s why I was reading about it) seem to be prime suspects for this type of jargon. You can read about BSS on ZDNet.co.uk, but it’s mainly white paper materials.
The reason BBS is my acronym du jour is that I was doing some work last night related to application development for Unified Messaging (UM) environments oops! – agh! There’s goes another one! Anyway BSS isn’t BS when it comes to convergent communications scenarios as it, allegedly, helps manage the entire product lifecycle across all network domains.
With all the doom and gloom about share prices and recession this week maybe we should look for areas of optimism huh? Ok here goes… Africa is still a growing market, particularly for communications services – and this of course especially includes mobile. As African nations deploy more layers to their comms infrastructures, perhaps they will also bring in UM and developers who work in this space will need to embrace BSS.
Look, I’m just trying to be optimistic OK? It’s a nippy October Wednesday and my boiler is broken. Surely the bottle must be half full somewhere.
PreviousComments on this post
Do you ever get the feeling that continually using new acronyms is driving us a step closer to using full-on txtspk in the workplace?
It's hard to keep up with the latest creations, thankfully they appear on Wikipedia first.
"Hmm, what do you call an acronym within an acronym?"
It''s a recursive acronym like the language PHP meaning PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It's all highly confusing really. Anyway super-acronym sounds far better :)
Super-acronym was meant to be a homage to the term 'super-group' - as in when Rage Against The Machine combine with Soundgarden and you get Audioslave the 'super-group'...
Maybe all this acronym usage will lead us towards a pared down Orwellian dystopia with DoubleSpeak Leetspeak hell ruling our lives.
That's just IMHO of course.
Yes I'm confused! It does slow things down some what, when you have to go looking up meaning for abreviations. It used to be that the term was spelled out in its entirety with the abreviation in brackets afterwards, so when you came across an abreviation a second time, you could refer back to its first reference. I wonder how much bandwith is being used up with people opening up tabs or windows to learn the meaning of these things.
I tell ya guys - communication for us humans needs some work.
It has made me take a step back this week - I'll tell you why.
I'm off to next week Munich to attend Trolltech's Developer Days conference - sorry that should now be Qt Developer Days after the corporate reshuffle last week - and it got me thinking about Germany...
My wife's maiden name used to be Germanic before the Americans adopted a policy of "simplifying" names when the New World was being built.
So that, for example, Johanessan became Johnson etc...
Why can't we simplify rather than complicate eh? OK, HTML is easier than HyperText Markup Language - but somebody needs to draw a line here please.
We have the PLAIN ENGLISH campaign don't we? How about the Plain Tech Speak Campaign....?
Have we started something do ya think?
Good plan! Yes it's a great idea, and comunication does need to be looked after. I couldn't begin to tell you the amount of misunderstandings I have witnessed because of the word 'original'
Meaning 1: true to a form already existing, like the original.
Meaning 2: unique, innovative, original.
Maybe there could be a glossery of terms attatched to tech sites.
From this one through to the mighty sysinternals. As you say Adrian, The Plain Tech Speak Campaign.
I think some techs like the mystery of being incomprehensible to the layperson man.
Hey Roger -
I think the Plain Tech Speak Campaign is a story in it's own right.
My first submission:
"Highly-robust mission-critical enterprise-grade next-generation intuitive solution"
... becomes ...
"Nifty piece of kit"
AdrianB :-)
