TERM

DEFINITION

Effectiveness

A measure of whether the Objectives of a Process, Service or Activity have been achieved. An Effective Process or activity is one that achieves its agreed Objectives. See KPI.

Efficiency

Measures of whether the right amount of resources have been used to deliver a Process, Service or Activity. An Efficient Process achieves its Objectives with the minimum amount of time, money, people or other resources. See KPI.

Emergency Change

(Change Management) A Change that must be introduced as soon as possible. For example to resolve a Major Incident or implement a Security patch. The Change Management Process will normally have a specific Procedure for handling Emergency Changes. See Change Advisory Board / Emergency Committee (CAB/EC).

Environment

A subset of the IT Infrastructure that is used for a particular purpose. For Example: Live Environment, Test Environment, Build Environment. It is possible for multiple Environments to share a Configuration Item, for example Test and Live Environments may use different partitions on a single mainframe computer. Also used in the term Physical Environment to mean the accommodation, air conditioning, power system etc.

Error

A design flaw or malfunction that causes a Failure of one or more Configuration Items or IT Services. A mistake made by a person or a faulty Process that impacts a CI or IT Service is also an Error. See Known Error.

Error Control

(Problem Management) The Activity responsible for managing Known Errors until they are Resolved by the successful implementation of Changes. See Problem Control

Escalation

An Activity that obtains additional Resources when these are needed to meet Service Level Targets or Customer expectations. Escalation may be needed within any IT Service Management Process, but is most commonly associated with Incident Management, Problem Management and the management of Customer complaints. There are two types of Escalation, Functional Escalation and Hierarchical Escalation.

Event

An Alert or notification created by any IT Service, Configuration Item or monitoring tool. For example a notification that a batch job has completed. Events typically require IT Operations personnel to take actions, and often lead to Incidents being logged.

Event Management

The Process responsible for managing Events throughout their Lifecycle. Event Management is one of the main Activities of IT Operations.

Exception Report

A Document containing details of one or more KPIs or other important targets that have exceeded defined thresholds. Examples include SLA targets being missed or about to be missed, and a Performance Metric indicating a potential Capacity problem.

External Customer

A Customer who works for a different Business to the IT Service Provider. See Internal Customer.

External Service Provider

An IT Service Provider which is part of a different Business to their Customer. An IT Service Provider may have both Internal Customers and External Customers. See Internal Service Provider, Application Service Provider, Internet Service Provider.