Understanding IT Acronyms and Terms Dictionary
IT provider’s have their own world of acronyms and terms. Some of the one’s we see on a daily basis are on our list below. This will be an on-going list to help visitors understand some of the terms they might come across in the future
IT provider’s have their own world of acronyms and terms. Some of the one’s we see on a daily basis are on our list below. This will be an on-going list to help visitors understand some of the terms they might come across in the future
Acronyms and Terms
CIO
(CIO) manages the implementation of the useful technology to increase information accessibility and integrated systems management. The CIO is generally responsible for the processes and practices supporting the flow of information.
Compliance
Contractual Services meet established guidelines
CTO
Also sometimes known as a Chief Technical Officer, is an executive-level position in a company or other entity whose occupant is focused on scientific and technological issues within an organization
Discovery
Automated collection of infrastructure information. The ITSM tool should be configured in the organizations network environment to discover in-scope, eligible, compatible, accessible, and available network connected end-points. The discovered data is recorded in the ITSM Enterprise CMDB and includes live hardware and configuration attributes, installed software and configuration attributes and relationships between discovered CI’s, if these are supported by the ITSM tools. The typical cost for Electronic Discovery is one-half to one-fifth the cost of conducting a physical inventory. When correctly deployed, Electronic Discovery of the networked devices is the most efficient and cost effective method available to capture configuration attributes related to the live infrastructure environment. While physical inventory potentially captures a larger population of devices, (e.g. non-IP, non-network connected), Electronic Discovery captures a more detailed range of attributes
External Feeds
Liaising with external client asset management for optimal results
Financial Management
Documentation of the IT Service relationships: including the ability for forecasting and chargeback in financial management.
Inventory
Managing both physical and logical assets is included in a SACM (Service Asset and Configuration Management – ITIL)
Items
Actual Parts of the information service to be procured
Knowledge Repository/Knowledge Transfer
Collective data both current and historical that denotes common problems and steps to resolution
Legal Management
Insures compliance with both ethical and legal standards with software and hardware asset management
Life Cycle
Life cycle data often contains attributes that result from life cycle processing such as purchase order, invoice number and date, warranty date, department, owner and management assignments). If reliable life cycle attributes are available, these will include CI attributes such as purchase, invoice, warranty, physical location, ownership, management, support, purpose, cost center, department, and contract association. The Lifecycle Data Overlay combined with data recorded from Electronic Discovery expands the completeness of the SACM repository and enables a more effective SACM service. Lifecycle Management supports the alignment with governance and compliance frameworks such as HIPAA, SOX, CobiT, SAS 70, and others for management of change
A completely holistic perspective on the full life of services, covering the entire IT organization and all supporting components needed to deliver services.
Managed Service Provider
Managed IT Service Providers are companies that can assume responsibility of all aspects of your IT organization if desired. This means you can continue to focus on your core competencies while leveraging the MSP’s existing processes, people, products and partners.
Normalization
From a technical point of view, these are managed objects with their corresponding properties. Incoming data is normalized in order to ensure comparability between different data sources. The interrelations between objects are predefined to some extent and/or can be added by the user.
Precedence
This component deals with information gathered and verifying that the information that is being collected for SACM is accurate. (Service Asset and Configuration Management – ITIL)
Procurement
Service Request and Asset Fulfillment enables requests of an organization’s specific, whole unit, software, CRU and FRU products and related services from an online hierarchical Service Catalog.
- Tendering Supplier
- Monitoring Contract Services
- All Contracted Items Met
Reconciliation
A federated CMDB must prevent data duplication, as well as be able to understand that different pieces of data gathered by different tools—an IP address, patch level, a host name—all belong to the same component. This process is called reconciliation, and experts say it’s critical to a successful CMDB. They also say most reconciliation engines are proprietary. Reconciliation defines CI precedence from multiple sources, and a reliable titling engine resolves differences in registry descriptions, such as manufacturer name that change over time. The Lifecycle Data Overlay combined with data recorded from Electronic Discovery expands the completeness of the SACM repository and enables a more effective SACM service.
Reports
This is the process of providing relevant and useful metrics for accurate information management.
Re-purpose
This step involves identifying candidate licenses for harvesting — from retired or repurposed assets
Service Contracts
Enables the negotiation of desired vs. delivered performance of business services, enabling true business oriented-metrics instead of device or IT service-oriented metrics.
Stock
The goods/merchandise that are maintained in inventory on premise, which are available for sale.
SW Asset Management
Managing and Optimizing the purchase, maintenance, utilization, and disposal of software applications
Transfers
Real-time physical and logical location topology tracking
Summary
We hope this list is helpful as you look for IT Services. We’ll continue to exand this list to make it more helpful and if you come across any IT terms you are unsure of, please feel free to contact us for any help.