IT Manager? Have a Word With Yourself

In fact, have nearly 300

IT Support guru Noel Bruton has published the glossary of his ‘Mastering IT Support Delivery’ (MISD) curriculum of certified training in IT Support professionalism and method. This 16-page, 7000-word document offers some 300 definitions of terms and concepts, for use by any I.T. workgroup with a support element to its output.

In a particularly unusual move, Bruton has released the work under a Creative Commons licence, so that anybody may make any use of the glossary – including republication – free of charge.

Accuracy

“A properly-informed management decision requires accuracy,” Bruton comments, “and that’s just not always there in current I.T. parlance. We have to get past imprecise language, for example where ‘incident’ can mean something that is either urgent or not, and where a certain demand requiring immediate attention is just a ‘request’.”

This IT Support-specific vocabulary is also about the users and what they will understand. So in MISD, a ‘problem’ is a problem the way a user would see it, and ‘Root-Cause Analysis’ is something else.

Of course being specialised, the glossary contains numerous expressions hitherto only available to certified MISD professionals. Proprietary techniques for allocating resources to workload are defined, along with other essential concepts not found in the common I.T. lexicon, such as the difference between ‘Service Level’ and ‘Operational’ statistics.

Popular

Currently popular terms are included too, where these are pertinent to I.T. Support. MISD acknowledges that support does not stop at the Service Desk, often requiring the diagnostic input of any I.T. workgroup from Desktop Support to Developers. So there are ideas describing how developers can ensure resources for projects, despite the support-request onslaught they must also cope with. Support-tinted definitions of ‘DevOps’, ‘Digital Transformation’, and ‘Lean’ rub shoulders with essentially production terminology such as ‘pre-diagnosis’, ‘authority escalation’, and ‘Lost User-Productivity’.

Bruton continues, “There are terms here for concepts vital to IT management, that because of our industry’s historical fixation with the ‘Service Desk’ as the end of support, have been simply omitted from usual consideration. Many of them will be new to IT professionals. But they are needed so we can give I.T. Support the full management attention it needs.”

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