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IS or IT - does it matter?

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by tech_know

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There is a debate in my office about the "computer department" department name. One person asserts that IS department serves a different function than IT department and that they are really 2 distinct departments. ONe person asserts that IT is another name link in the evolution of the data proccessing cycle. DP turns into MIS which turns into IS which turns into IT.

Does a name really matter that much?

Comments anyone?

5 replies

by mrbill-

Some places call IS Info Security, also know as IA Info Assurance, I can?t keep any of these acronyms straight nowadays.

by radiic

Im called BIS. Bank Information Systems. All though I still answer With "IS, this Mike" (No Typo there either) No one ever laughs... Are they ID10T 's

Rad ;0

by generalist

When you get down to it, DP, MIS, IS and IT are effectively the same for many organizations. Unless you're large enough to have a lot of specialization, it doesn't matter what the 'computer department' is called as long as everybody uses the same term. In small and medium sized organizations the title is usually the result of office politics combined with semantic drift.

Of course, it can be embarassing if you have to put 'Computer Department' on your resume despite the fact that said department is state-of-the-art in all it does. That is when the manager of the department should start lobbying to change it to a more current name if office politics allow such actions.

by littledragon

In most of the companies for which I have worked, the term IS generally refered to the progammaing staff that developed and maintained the business applications - i.e., systems. IT, on the other hand, usually refered to the computer operations and system programming staff that dealt with the hardware, operating systems, tools, and telecoms. These were mostly large IBM mainframe data centers. Perhaps these terms don't carry the same distinction in today's Microsoft and Unix server based shops.

At my current job, the computer operations and support personnel are called Infrastructure Operations and Support. Hey, a rose by any other name...

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