>>This morning we got the news that our department's name will change from MIS to IT, the reason being that MIS is outdated. I don't have any statistics, but it seems IT is more common.
>>Can anyone comment on the proposed change - i.e. good/bad idea, (in)significant, other thoughts?
>
>The frequent name changes are confusing. When I first read about "MIS", "IT" and "IS", I thought there was a whole new science involved. Actually, it could all just as well be called the "computing department".

Remember when computers were just slightly more capable than today's pocket calculators, yet were called "electronic brains"? What's in a name...

This art of inventing names is very often ersatz change - can't do anything about the matter, at least give it a new name. These days I mostly see this in the names of the colors of the things I'm buying for the bathroom. There are about ten different names for the color of white tiles. Why? Because there are no white tiles. They can't seem to hit it with a proper white, each one is either a bit greyish, or bit creamy or a bit bluish. So they have "arctic white", "glossy white" etc, just none of them really white.

Today I returned a bathroom rack, because it was very ugly. It said "pearl nickel" on the box, but inside it was more like a slightly metallic rgb(173, 160, 146), ugly as inflation, IMO. If anyone saw a pearl of that color, I'm Napoleon.