IT Performs - The Business Intelligence Specialists

Glossary


Below you will find a list of BI terms and acronyms. If you are looking for a definition that does not appear, please contact us.


BI Extranets

A system of computers enabling organisations to communicate and share information. Normally used for linking a company with customers and suppliers.


BI Standardisation

Rationalising a multitude of BI applications to a smaller, more integrated and compatible product that matches the needs of the enterprise.


Business Activity Monitoring

Provides the infrastructure necessary for real-time access to the key performance indicators that run and monitor the business, and enables organisations to react to customer issues, monitor product delivery and provide continuous improvement of their customer- facing business processes.


Business Intelligence (BI)

The process of gathering data and converting this into information enabling future business strategies and decisions to be made, using tools such as software applications and analytical methodologies.


Business Performance Management

Applications that help direct modelling or scenario exploration activities. Rather than simply exploring what happened and why, the application can help the user consider the implications of alternative courses of action before they become operational.


Business Process Automation (BPA)

The process of integrating enterprise applications, reducing human intervention wherever possible, and assembling software services into end-to-end process flows.


Business Process Management (BPM)

A set of processes that help organisations optimise business performance. It focuses on business processes such as planning and forecasting and helps businesses discover efficient use of their business units, financial, human, and material resources.


Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

The leveraging of technology suppliers to provide and manage a company's critical and/or non-critical enterprise applications.


Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

A management approach that examines aspects of a business and its interactions, and attempts to improve the efficiency of the underlying processes.


Collaborative Business Intelligence

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: You can use collaborative business intelligence to capitalise on the collective insight and experience of all employees. Effective collaboration among people, teams, and organisations is a key to achieving and maintaining competitive advantage.


Competitive Intelligence

Researching the environment a business operates in, in order to influence its emerging strategy for business development.


Complex Event Processing (CEP)

CEP is a technology for building and managing event-driven information systems (also known as Event Stream Processing, ESP). It deals with the task of processing multiple streams of event data with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within those streams.


Contingent Staff Procurement (CSP)

Hi-tech tools that facilitate increased visibility and centralisation of the procurement process.


Customer Intelligence

Managing and analysing customer information to both enhance the customer experience and improve the two-way value proposition.


Data Access and Distribution

The software and activities related to storing, retrieving, or acting on data housed in a database or other repository.


Data Cleansing and Validation

The process of ensuring that a program operates on clean, correct and useful data. Manipulating the data extracted from operational systems so as to make it usable by the data warehouse.


Data Extraction, Transformation and Loading

How external or internal data is retrieved and transformed to fit business needs.


Data Integration

The process of combining two or more data sets together for sharing and analysis, in order to support information management inside a business.


Data Marts

Databases designed to help managers make strategic decisions about their business on a particular subject or department.


Data Mining

The process of using analytical techniques to seek meaningful correlations, patterns, trends in a large group of data, also called Analytics and Database Analytics.


Data Visualisation

Data represented by visually recognised patterns and trends.


Data Warehousing

Collections of data across an entire enterprise designed to support management decision-making by presenting a picture of business conditions at a single point in time.


E-commerce Reporting

Allows you to analyse shopping cart usage in conjunction with your web traffic to get search term ROI.


Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

The translation of data and commands from the format of one application into the format of another.


Enterprise Business Intelligence Suites (EBISs)

Integrated suites of query, reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools.


Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

ECM is the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes.


Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

Streamlining integration of data from many distributed sources while providing standardised access to integrated data views through one virtual data source.


Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

An integrated suite of analytic applications enabling organisations to drive world-class performance by aligning the right information and resources to strategic objectives.


Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Multi-module application software that helps a company manage the important parts of its business such as product planning, parts purchasing, inventory management, supplier interaction, customer service, order tracking, finance and human resources.


Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)

An open specification that uses XML-based data tags to describe financial statements for both public and private companies. Its purpose is to use accepted financial reporting standards and practices to simplify the preparation, exchange and analysis of financial statements.


Financial Reporting and Analysis

The analysis of the accounts and the economic prospects of a firm, and the way this is reported.


Forecasting

Using data and analysis of recurring events and actions to predict the outcome of future ventures.


Fraud and Anti-Money Laundering

Money laundering is the process by which criminals attempt to conceal the true origin and ownership of the proceeds of criminal activities. If successful, the money can lose its criminal identity and appear legitimate.


Human Resource Intelligence

Data and information stored regarding the individuals within the organisation. This can assist with working patterns and methods to maximise employee output.


Integration Competency Centre (ICC)


Management Intelligence (MI)

MI extends traditional Business Intelligence, supporting the rapid development of decision-centric applications across industries.


Master Data Management (MDM)

MDM is the practice and technology of providing business and IT with the capability to define and link master data that includes definition, reference, and metadata in a secure and high quality manner.


Meta Data

Information that characterises the who, what, where, and how related to data collection. Often, the information refers to special tagged fields in a document that provide information about the document to search engines and other computer applications.


Modelling and Predictive Trend Analysis

Describing the organisation of data in a manner that reflects the information structure of an application or an enterprise.


Multidimentional Expressions (MDX)

A language to manipulate multidimensional information in SQL Server Analysis Services. MDX provides a rich and powerful syntax for the retrieval and manipulation of multidimensional data, such as the data stored in cubes on the Analysis server.


Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Database software that provides an interface so users can transform or limit raw data quickly and examine the results in various dimensions of the data interactively.


Operating and Financial Review (OFR)

An OFR is a narrative explanation of the main trends and factors underlying the development, performance and position of an entity during the financial year covered by the financial statements, and those which are likely to affect the entity's future development, performance and position.


Querying and Reporting

Manipulating data for a specific business requirement and presenting this in the most appropriate format.


Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

Transponder technology for the contactless recognition of objects. The heart of this technology is the so-called RFID tag, a small computer chip with a miniature antenna. It can be used on transport and goods packages as well as sales units and products. When the chip receives the radio signal from a reading device, it automatically transmits the stored data wirelessly. Transmission is based on radio frequencies. The tags are passive; they do not require any battery or maintenance.


Real-Time Business Analytics

The next generation of data mining that facilitates the flow of quality information as it happens, to enable faster actionable decision cycles.


Relational Database Servers

A relational database creates formal definitions of all the included items in a database, setting them out in tables, and defines the relationship between them.


Report Writing

The specifying and designing of reports based upon data held in a particular database system.


Risk Analysis

Identifying and assessing factors that may jeopardise the success of a project or achieving a goal.


Return on Investment (ROI)


Scorecards, Portals and Dashboards

A scorecard is an application or custom user interface that helps you manage your organisation's performance by understanding, optimising, and aligning organisational units, business processes, and individuals. A portal is a front-end gateway to information and/or applications specific to users needs or requirements. A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.


Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

A networked organisational system making resources available to other participants in the network as independent services that the participants access in a standardised way.


Six Sigma

A quality management program to achieve six sigma levels of quality. Pioneered by Motorola in the mid-1980s, it aims to have the total number of failures in quality, or customer satisfaction, occur beyond the sixth sigma of likelihood in a normal distribution of customers.


Supply Chain Intelligence

It provides a single view across your supply chain to make data your ally, not your enemy. Pre-packaged key performance indicators (KPI), analytics, and alerts help you zero in on the primary drivers behind supply chain processes-planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and returns-so you can analyse and act to increase your supply chain efficiency.


Technical Consultancy

Consultancy that is focused on the technical aspect of application and solutions based around business intelligence.


Text Mining

Looking for patterns in natural language text, may also be defined as the process of analysing text to extract information from it for particular purposes.


Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

TCO is a financial estimate designed to help consumers and enterprise managers assess direct and indirect costs related to the purchase of any capital investment, such as (but not limited to) computer software or hardware.


Web Analysis

Measuring and analysing concrete details of web visitors online behaviour, allowing organisations to optimise their web site structure and content so as to serve their customers better.