ITIL terminology is one of the subjects that also gets spoken about a great deal. Some people question about he need for more acronyms and abbreviations since the IT industry already has so many.

Let me put your mind at rest. Yes, there is a need, so that once it (ITIL)- becomes commonplace used we ALL have a common reference frame – that is no matter which organization we are talking to when we say RFC (request for change) we all know exactly what that is. I have included some of the more ambiguous ones on this page of ITIL Terminology focusing on acronyms and abbreviations.

ITIL Terminology - Acronyms 101

AMDB           Availability Management Database

ARCI            Accountability, Responsibility, Consulted, Informed

AST              Agreed Service Time

BCM             Business Continuity Management

BIA              Business Impact Analysis

BPR              Business Process Re-engineering

BSI              British Standards Institute

CAB             Change Advisory Board

CAB/EC        Change Advisory Board Emergency Committee

CCTA            Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency

CDB             Capacity (Management) Database

CFIA            Component Failure Impact Analysis

CI                Configuration Item

CIA              Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability

CMDB           Configuration Management Database

CMM            Capability Maturity Model

COBIT          Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology

CSF              Critical Success Factor

CSIP            Continuous Service Improvement Program

CSS              Customer Satisfaction Survey

CTO             Chief Technology Officer

DHS             Definitive Hardware Store

DSL              Definitive Software Library

EFQM           European Foundation for Quality Management

EXIN            Examination Institute for Information Science

FTA              Fault Tree Analysis

FSC              Forward Schedule of Change

KER              Known Error Record

KPI              Key Performance Indicator

KSF              Key Success Factors 

IR                Incident Report

ISEB            Information Systems Examination Board

ITAMM          IT Availability Metrics Model

ITSC             IT Service Continuity

ITSCM          IT Service Continuity Management

ITSM            Information Technology Service Management

itSMF           IT Service Management Forum

IVR              Interactive Voice Response

KPI              Key Performance Indicator

MAC             Movements, Additions and Changes

MTBF           Mean Time Between Failures

MTBSI          Mean Time Between System Incidents

MTTR            Mean Time To Repair

OGC             Office of Government Commerce

OLA             Operational Level Agreement

PIR              Post Implementation Review

PR                Problem Record

PRINCE         Projects IN Controlled Environments

PSA              Projected Service Availability

PMF             Process Maturity Framework

QA               Quality Assurance

RFC              Request For Change

ROCE           Return On Capital Employed

ROI              Return On Investment

SIP              Service Improvement Program

SLA              Service Level Agreement

SLM             Service Level Management

SLR              Service Level Requirement

SMART            Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-related

SOR             Statement Of Requirements

SOA             System Outage Analysis

SPOF            Single Point of Failure

SPI              Software Process Improvement

SPMF           Service management Process Maturity Framework

SWOT           Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

TCO             Total Cost of Ownership

TOP              Technical Observation Post

TQM             Total Quality Management

VBF             Vital Business Function