What exactly is an IT (eye-tee) department?
Information Technology – the computer dept, basically.
We’re the geeks that come up to plug the LAN cable back in when your foot snagged it. We also conspire ways to prevent you from accessing your AOL or Yahoo mail from work. Most near and dear to my heart, we’re the freakazoids that dream up rules like how your password must be 13 characters long, have upper and lower case letters, two punctuation symbols and one Chinese pictograph.
Seriously, IT or IS (Information Technology or Information Services) departments are the folks that manage and maintain the computers, networks and such.
“IT” because it’s more than just computers. Many IT departments are responsible for everything from voice-over-IP telecoms to printing and distributing management information reports. It’s a little “buzz-word”-y, but not heinously so. It may sound a little pompous, but it reflects a very important point in modern business: computing isn’t just a black hole of helpdesk staff and engineers, it’s a department that (used properly) can help a business gather, process and use information efficiently to make a profit.
Also often referred to as an IS (Information Systems) or MIS (Management Information Systems) department.
Thank you.
I work in a MIS department. Damned if I know what it means.
The “in vogue” abbreviation has changed every couple of years since I was a kid. Here are some I remember (roughtly in chronological order):
EDP=Electronic Data Processing
DP=Data Processing
MIS=Management Information Systems
IS=Information Systems
IT=Information Technology
Actually, while DP/EDP and MIS are one and the same, Computer/IT is another department. The former is database and report writing, the latter is computer networks, technical support, etc.
Some people use these different acronyms to refer to more specific job functions - I imagine this may vary somewhat between industries and companies. For us, IT tends to specifically mean the folks that manage PCs and maybe PC/midrange servers. They don’t write code, they don’t write reports, they just fill the important role of keeping everything going. DP I don’t hear as much - but I tend to associate it with mainframe operations folks. MIS and is often used to describe a reporting group, but it may also be used to describe a database management or even a software development group.
Of course we also have Software Engineering or whatever grandiose title that we coders have chosen to slap on ourselves this year 