There are millions of business acronyms. At my last company, someone went through all the trouble of actually developing an acronym dictionary for new sales people. That’s a pretty helpful idea isn’t it? We’ve all been in that meeting where things are moving fast and people are referencing acronyms that we don’t understand but we don’t want to interrupt and ask what we’re talking about because people will think we’re dumb. One of my favorite acronym conversations happened on Friends when Chandler’s boss said that the WENUS (weekly net usage) has not been good at all over the last few weeks and that’s going to create a bad ANUS (annual net usage). The acronyms were clear but unfortunate. I even have a good story from my past. My first job out of college was an Assistant Analyst, you had to be careful how you abbreviated that title, I was trying to shorten it once and came up with Ass. Anal. and realized I needed a new job.

Anyway, it seems that many of our system acronyms, although cute, actually allude to the systems themselves solving the wrong problems. Take the LMS or Learning Management System for one. A friend of mine posted a question on LinkedIn the other day about lessons learned from LMS projects. I enthusiastically commented that usability was overlooked for functionality. So, maybe it managed learning or reported on learning or connected learning data to employee data but what part of that is good for the learner? In my experience, very little. We actually had a group that went from two clicks to access learning on their old system to about six clicks in the new one. And don’t think that those six clicks were as fun as playing doodle jump either – they were confusing and you had to do things like “book a course” before you could “take a course” and then you had to “confirm participation” at the end in order to get credit. We also had to train people to use the system. Yikes. One time I did a series of usability sessions before launching an intranet site and when we asked about training, people emphatically said not to send them paper because they wouldn’t read it and not to invite them to training because they wouldn’t come. They were a little crabby but isn’t that how it should be? The new system should work better than before right? The LMS should help learners, the Content Management System should make content better and easier to organize, the Applicant Tracking System should help applicants. In my recent experience, all those acronyms are a lie. How about yours?