A friend of mine on the IT side of things always jokes that if one needs to sound technically impressive, one just needs to throw around a bunch of TLAs. What's a TLA? A Three Letter Acronym, of course. The IT world is full of them and has been for years: ERP, CRM, XML, SQL, SAX, DOM, and the new developer darling SOA (which in some ways is just an update of the old RPC). Of course, a popular BA (bigramic acronym) is XP (eXtreme Programming), but TLAs are still the stock-in-trade for most of the acronym-makers.
Lately, though, I've noticed the need many have to actually move to FLEAs, a term that I think I may be the first to coin: a FLEA is a Four Letter Enhanced Acronym. A popular one today on the development side is AJAX (for Asynchronous Java and XML). Then I was reading a Boston Consulting Group paper on COPEs. What's a COPE? Well, do you remember COEs, Centers of Excellence? Pretty much the same deal, but a COPE is a "Center of Process Excellence"
Now, the nice thing about FLEAs is that you have a much better chance at creating pronouncable words. While there are just fewer than 18,000 possible TLAs there are fewer than 3,500 if you require at least one to be a vowel, and even most of those don't result in a pronouncable word. This, and the availability of another 450,000 possible FLEAs for vendors to create and market should insure their success for years to come.
So just remember, you read it here first: FLEA is the new TLA. Watch for them.
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