Despite my anorak tendencies I am not Dr Johnson and don't
have time to create an entire dictionary from scratch. Many
definitions here are therefore taken from the wise words of
others. Where this is the case the source is gratefully acknowledged.
If I have internalised your definition of something so completely
that it appears here without atttribution, let me know and
I will rectify the ommission.
Definitions do matter. The fields of data quality, IT and Direct Marketing
are, as Brackett puts it, "lexically challenged". Failure to define terms
and to use language precisely go hand in hand with woolly thinking and
broken logic. The resulting combination of miscommunication and misapprehension
dogs both theory and practice.
This is not helped by the hype merchants who invariably hijack any new
idea and redefine it to put their own sales proposition squarely at its
centre. CRM is possibly the most spectacular example of this, with some
people unable to even agree on what the three letters themselves actually
stand for. The unedifying bickering that goes on in various media about
what CRM really means is the modern equivalent of debating how many angels
can dance on the head of pin, only with less practical use.
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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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| A |
Acronyms
The world of IT is an alphabet soup of acronyms. Many business people claim
this is purely designed to confuse and shut them out. While there may be
some truth in this (see FUD), it should not be overlooked that acronyms
themselves have a kind of heirarchy which can provide useful clues.
Three letter acronyms generally represent some high concept IT or mangement
fashion. The truth is they are generally coined by the vendor/consultant
community in the course of their attempts to sell IT in to a new part of
the client organisation, or to talk up some technical advance as the successor
to a previous IT bandwagon that is running out of steam. Thus EIS becomes
DSS becomes BI.
Five letter acronyms are generally reserved for big, usually bespoke, software
projects within organisations. When the project is completed, or at least
stopped, the resulting system inherits the project name. Organisations
everywhere are currently spending millions to get rid of legacy systems
with names like QUEST, LASSY, TRACE and BONGO (I made the last one up).
The recent trend has been for projects to be given longer names (not acronyms
as such) like Persephone or Hercules. Business people should think very
carefully before becoming involved with projects of this sort. If the name
is drawn from classical mythology run a mile. If it is also supposed to
have been chosen because it has some meaning apposite to the project, such
as "new dawn" or "bright future", run ten.
My personal preference would be for projects to be given native american
names, in the style of "Dances with Wolves". Most american place
names of this type turn out to mean "It's a hill, stupid" or "White man
with bad haircut ask too many questons". In the same way, people could
plug away at projects blissfully unaware that the project name means "pour
gold down deep hole", "Run up the down-escalator" or "Mediocre consultants
retirement fund".
An added benefit of native american names is that they would be unpronounceable
and impossible to spell, which means people would not use them, which would
be a blessing. Oh, and they would also be too long to print on mugs.
ASP
Application Service Provision.
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| B |
BAM
Business Activity Management.
Balanced Scorecard
The eminently sensible idea that if the management and direction of your
organisation is going to be based on measures of activity and performance,
you had better measure all the things that are important to performance,
and give them all appropriate levels of attention. Like so many ideas in
business this is so obviously right that you wonder why it isn’t
simply being done in all organisations already, and why people like Kaplan
and Norton can sell so many books on it. The answer is of course that the
actual doing of it, from choosing what to measure, to implementation of
reliable measurement systems, is fiendishly difficult.
BI
Business Intelligence. Using the word intelligence in the name of any function
or discipline is a double edged sword. It ups the stakes in claiming to
go way beyond mere information, but smacks of hubris. Just think of the
old joke about the definition of an oxymoron being the phrase Military
Intelligence. Personally I think BI is a useful and less clunky term than
its predecessors, as long as you are careful to establish that you are
defining intelligence in the sense of timely and relevant information,
which then it fits perfectly into the information value chain concept.
BPM
Business Performance Management.
Brochureware
The quick and fundamentally uselesss way to build a Website
- put up a load of pages which are largely unaltered copies
of the corporate catalogue or brochure. Without any attempt
to organise information for easy navigation, with no use of
the opportunities to interact with customers and prospects,
and either no attempt to offer e-commerce or one that is so
simplistic it simply doesn't work, this kind of site is symptomatic
of the bandwagon jumping days when the web first hit the headlines,
and every marketing director or MD decreed "we must have a presence
on the web" no matter how little they understood it. Pointless
and annoying to the customer in equal measure, they are a source
of great comfort to technology illiterate executives, who feel
their organisation is now at the leading edge.
You would think that by now all such sites built in the early days would
have been taken down, and that no-one these days would build such half
baked efforts. You'd be wrong.
Business as usual
Highly dangerous term often used to label activity in the organisation
that is not part of a large project or initiative. Perpetuates the ludicrous
idea that the organisation outside of projects is static, and leads to
all kinds of muddled thinking. In truth all organisational activity is
in a constant state of evolution. In the context of information management,
the bit that is not explicitly involved in delivering capability building
projects must nonetheless be set up to cope with constant changes in information processes and
provision to meet the constantly evolving needs of the business.
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| C |
CDI
Customer Data Integration. Suddenly seems to be getting attention
at senior level in organisations, and it is turning up in the
conference schedules and magazine articles. This is a sure sign
that a number of large vendors are pushing this as a new wave
of innovation, on the back of which they can sell in new software
and services. The fact that they favour the term CDI, which suggests
a project, over CDM, which suggests a process, may have something
may have to do with their enthusiasm to cash in on the work
they have done to publicise this area before the board's attention
wanders off elsewhere.
The degree to which there is genuinely new technology innovation in this area is questionable.
Much of the functionality for cleaning and integrating data has been around for a long time.
CDM
No, not Cadbury's Dairy Milk(you're showing your age). Customer
Data Management: a subset of master data management (MDM) that
refers to the practice of synchronizing and standardizing customer
data. Another angle on the age-old quest to achieve a Single
Customer View.
Succes in this are ia only partially about technology. A recent
survey from Boston-based analyst firm Aberdeen Group shows that above-average
and average performers were twice as likely as below-average
performers to use CDI and data quality tools (surprise). Leaders were
nearly twice as likely to use a service-oriented architecture
or Web services platform to facilitate data integration. The power of web services and SOA to
integrate the scattered landscape of custome touchpoints and point solution marketing applications
is noted in a number of recent updates to this site
Notably, none of the companies in the top tiers reported using
enterprise MDM platforms. The message seems to be that Enterprise
MDM is too big to tackle in one hit, while a focus on customer
data can be turned rapidly to concrete competitive advantage
Clearly, effective CDM is not just about having integrated, clean customer data, (though that has to be the starting point)
It is mainly about leveraging that data to increase revenue and profitability- in other words, driving the benefit of the data
quality improvements right through the
the Information Value Chain
CIF
Corporate Information Factory.
Consultants
Consultants in specialist areas; data sourcing, data modelling, information
quality, addresss management, information strategy and so on, can be worth
their weight in gold. Which may be what they charge, but don't underestimate
the value of years of experience. Experience is the name people give to
their mistakes, and these chaps have made their mistakes using someone
elses money. Paying them will help you avoid making the same costly mistakes
with your money, and therefore is likely to pay for itself many times over.
Don't mix this up with the widespread suspicion of generalist management
cosultants. When you need an expert get one. It will save you time, money
and hours of stultifying boredom learning arcane details about dependent
thoroughfares on PAF files or the detail of fuzzy matching algorithms.
CPM
Corporate Performance Management. Presumably there are those invloved in
BI who feel undersold that their area does not have a full TLA, and that
two letters is not enough. The result is the instantly forgettable CPM,
which sounds far too like CRM for it’s own good. Like Knowledge Management,
it goes too far in claiming that technology can deliver at the top end
of the information value chain. Performance is ultimately down to people.
CPM is a curious retrenchment on the concept of BI, as it focusses on monitoring
and tuning performance, turning attention away from the big goals of insight
and strategy formation. (also known as EPM).
CRM
Customer Relationship Management. Enough said, already.
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| D |
Data
Facts - such as addresses, transaction dates, quantities and
values. The raw material from which Information is assembled.
"Data is individual raw facts. Since they are out of context,
they have no meaning and are difficult to understand. Facts
are numbers, characters, character strings, text, images,
voice, video and any other form in which a fact may be presented."
Michael H Brackett
Data Council
A group of senior stakeholders who meet regularly to be the
final arbiters on questions of strategy and policy affecting
the organisation's data resource. They also lead the culture
change effort that must underpin any move towards improving
data quality. Every organisation that is serious about getting
real value from their data resource should have one.
Data Mining
Incorrectly used by the ignorant as a catch all term for pretty much
any kind of analysis work or for undirected poking about in the data in the
hope of unearthing something useful. The proper technical term for the latter
is "poking about in the data". This can in fact be quite useful if it is done
by people who are capable of spotting anomalies which show up unexpected real
world patterns of action. In order to achieve this the analyst or "poker about"
needs both an intimate knowledge of the business and its processes and a sufficient
understanding of how these normally manifest themselves in the data.
True data mining uses technical solutions to explore patterns in the data, using some of the following approaches:
Association - looking for patterns where one event is connected to another event
Sequence or path analysis - looking for patterns where one event leads to another later event
Classification - looking for new patterns
Clustering - finding and visually documenting groups of facts not previously known
Data Quality (also DQ)
At its simplest level, validity, accuracy and completeness
of data within a field. At a strategic level the organisations
capabilities should never be constrained or compromised by
bad or missing data.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, Data quality is what everybody wishes
they had got, but nobody wants to work on getting.
In the real world quality is not absolute. See Fitness for
Purpose
Data Resource
Data assembled from operational systems and external sources
which is brought into repositories (databases) and made available
for access through various information applications
Data Strategy
Explicit document laying out the the methods by which will
the data resource will be managed, extended, enhanced, made
available to the organisation, and how this will evolve to
align with and underpin the overall strategic direction of
the organisation. Without one there will be either no work
on data or lots of unfocussed busy work chasing some illusory
goal of "data quality". Either way the net benefit to the
organisation will be next to zero.
Data Warehouse
"A single, complete, and consistent store of data obtained
from a variety of sources and made available to end users
in a way they can understand and use in a business context."
- Barry Devlin
DBA
Database Administrator.
DBMS
Database Management System. The software which runs your database,
be it Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Teradata, Microsoft Access
or whatever. Leave the system choice to your techies - they
know what they are doing and what they will have the skills
and resource to support. Do get involved with the design of
the database at the conceptual level. Learn to read an ERD.
The shape of your database will dictate the future capabilities
of your business.
Direct Marketing
The coining of this term is generally attributed to Lester
Wunderman as far back as 1961 (On the 1st October according
to the IDM).
" Any promotion activity which creates and exploits a direct
relationship between you and your prospect or customer as
an individual" - Drayton Bird
DSS – Decision Support systems
The term that replaced MIS (Management Information
Systems) or EIS (Executive Information Systems). These in
turn have largely been superceded by the slightly grandiose
term Business Intelligence (BI).
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| E |
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EAI
Enterprise Application Integration. The difficult businesss of stitching together disparate point solutions. This is where
data resource management and data governance, or the lack of it, really bites.
EDA, EDM
Enterprise Data Architecture, Enterprise Data Model.The concept
of defining an overarching structure for data across the whole
enterprise, within which that all new systems and applications
can be developed. In concept this is in many ways the data
equivalent to the technology based SOA.
EII
Enterprise Information Integration. A range of technologies and methodologies geared at furnishing a near-realtime
view of a given user's relevant data, whether it starts out in
a supply chain management system, an ERP or CRM system, or a plain old database. (Source: TechTarget)
EIM
You can tell when a TLA hasn't really caught on, by the number of alternative terms sharing the same initials.
So it is with Enterprise Information Management - or Enterprise Identity Mapping or Enterprise Instant Messaging.
EIS
Executive Information Systems. (Sometimes MIS - Management
Information Systems) Archaic term for what later became known
as DSS, Decision Support Systems, and is now generally referred
to as BI (Business Intelligence)
EPM
Enterprise Performance Management. See CPM and BPM.
ERD
Entity Relationship Diagram. Essentially a picture of the
things which can be represented by data in a database, and
the relationship between them. The way you define those things
and their relationships significantly prescribes what capabilities
the database can deliver. If you are serious about the process
of turning data into business value, at least learn to read
an ERD and understand it's business implications
ERP
Enterprise Reource Planning. Basically the concept is one
socking great system that runs everything in your organisation.
SAP and Oracle are preeminent examples. Though they seem to
work for some people, the installation of these monolithic,
stalinist megasystems are capable of stopping an organisation
in its tracks. A fraction of the investment in putting in
place data governance, good data quality tools and rules and
some well chosen specialist customer facing applications for
marketing, customer management or lead tracking could net
the business many times the ROI.
ETL
Extract Transform & Load. The process by which data is
moved from one system to another; eg from a transactional
system to a marketing database. Never forget that it consists
of three steps.
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| F |
FPS
Fax Preference Service. A blast from the past. One day I’ll have
fun explaining to my grandchildren what a fax was. And a pager.
Fitness for purpose
In connection with data quality, the idea that standards should be set
so that data will be good enough to allow business processes to operate,
without over-engineering. An essential antidote to chasing the holy grail
of some absolute standard of 100% quality. However, though it may be the
right answer it is by no means an easy answer, as data may be used for
many different purposes, some of them far downstream from its original
point of capture. Fitness for purpose standards therefore need to be framed
to support business processes that cut across traditional functional boundaries,
and set at the level of highest common denominator. Organisations attempting
to achieve this will need to consider having an explicit data strategy,
a data council and a designated Information Management function
FUD
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A technique of confusion marketing reputedly
originated by IBM, and considered by many to have reached its zenith with
Microsoft. In the relatively fast moving world of software development,
the fear that a new and better product is just around the corner can paralyse
decision making among clients. Sales of vendor A's product have on occasion
been stopped in their tracks by the judicious announcement by Vendor B
that their release of an even better product meeting the same needs is just
around the corner. Sometimes the corner is much further off than promised,
sometimes the product is no better or worse than the existing one. Sometimes
the product is vapourware.
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| G |
GIGO
Archaic abreviation for Garbage In Garbage Out. The fact you don’t
see it much these days does not make it any less true.
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| H |
HTML
Hyper Text Mark-up Language
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| I |
IAIDQ
The International Association for Information and Data Quality. Slowly building towards critical mass.
Already doing worthwhile work on a certification for data quality professionals. Join it not for what it
is, but for what it will be. Especially if you get in there and contribute.
Information
Information is a set of data in context that is relevant to one or more
people at a point in time or for a period of time. It is data in context
with respect to understanding what the facts mean. Information is data
imbued with meaning, relevance and purpose. - Michael H Brackett
"Data + definition + presentation = Information" - Larry English
Information Engineering
The work of defining, summarising, aggregating, labelling and preparing
raw data to turn it into information with relevance and purpose.
Information Management
1) The process of extracting value from the organisations data resource
by defining, delivering, maintaining and exploiting information.
2) The function within the business which carries out that process.
IQ
Information Quality. The slightly jokey abbreviation coined by Larry English
should not distract you from the importance of this - or the essential
truth that the Data Quality many people are seeking is really only a first
step.
Information Value Chain
The best summary I know of this key concept is in an article
by Michael H Brackett, "The Business Intelligence Value Chain",
first published in DM Review of March 1999. For a shorter summary click on this link:
Information
Alchemy: The Information Value Chain
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| J |
Java
Java is a programming language expressly designed for use in the distributed environment of the Internet.
The big deal to you is that it is platform independent (the same Java program runs on all hardware platforms
without modification). Java programs can be called from Web pages or run stand alone. When launched from a Web page,
the program is called a Java "applet." When a non Web-based Java program is run on a user's machine, it is
a Java "application."
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| K |
Knowledge Management
The mistaken idea that what is in peoples heads (knowledge) is fundamentally
the same stuff as can be documented in words, pictures charts etc (information).
This underestimates the unique and essential value-adding role of people,
who make things happen by applying skills, experience, reason, intuition,
passion, decision to information. You can’t bottle this stuff.
KPI
Key Performance Indicator. A top level measure which indicates the status
of some key element of the organisation’s activity. Most useful in
the context of the balanced scorecard, or dashboard.
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| L |
Laws
Brook's Law:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Biondi's Law:
If your project doesn't work, look for the part you didn't think was important.
Hofstadters Law:
Software projects always take longer than you expect, even if you take
into account Hofstadters Law
Palmer's First Law of Business Intelligence:
"Time spent creating a report is inversely proportional to time spent analysing
the resulting information."
This is doubly true if the person assembling the information is one and
the same as the person doing the analysis. By the time you have spent half
a day extracting assembling, deriving extra values and formatting a report
you are so wearily familiar with the data that you can no longer see the
information it could yield.
On a wider scale, the reports that soak up the most operational resource
to create are invariably the ones that have the least impact on organisational
activity ie the information does not lead to action. Most monthly management
reports fall into this category.
Putt's Law:
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
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| M |
Management Consultancy
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant
market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create
and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market.
Management Consulting, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped
the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation
processes. Using the Poultry Interaction Model (PIM) helped the chicken
use it's skills, methodologies, knowledge capital and experiences to align
the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of it's overall
strategy within a Program Managment framework. Managment Consulting convened
a diverse cross-spectrum of road analyst and best chickens along with managment
consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in
a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge
capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with
each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully
architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across
the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in
a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which
was strategically based, industry-focused and built upon a consistent,
clear and unified market message and alligned with the chicken's mission,
vision and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total
business integration solution. Managment Consulting helped the chicken
change to become more successful.
Enough said.
Master Data Management (MDM)
New applications are appearing that are based on the idea that the business needs to be able to define both the terms and the inbuilt heirarchies in descriptive data dimensions that are used to classify the (structurally less volatile) dimensions of customer addresses and transactions. Whats more it needs to do this dynamically in one place, and then push these new definitions out to other systems. Which seems eminently sensible.
Metadata
Data about data. The next big issue. Not sufficiently regarded now, this
will become another gold rush area, benefiting vendors of products that
can document, model and manage metadata. This will happen at the point
of convergence between increasing concern about data quality, recognition
of the need for an Enterprise Data Architecture, and the mainstream acceptance
of SOA.
MPS
Mailing Preference Service.
MSP
Marketing Services Provider.
Mugs (and other project ephemera)
On every major project now, some PR type is charged with internal communications
to "disseminate project values" and "ensure engagement". In their ceaseless
striving to find novel ways of achieving this they have spawned a tide
of mugs, mousemats, baseball caps, pen tubs, T-shirts, business card holders,
sweatshirts, key-rings and so on. Sadly for those who have worked on a
number of projects this stuff is not collectable, and has no market value.
You will never see a full set of doodads from Project Ethelred on the antiques
roadshow. The only exception might be where the project had some dimension
of social history - say a huge project to computerise a whole area of government
activity that went west and wasted vast sums of public money. Sadly this
is so commonplace that there is little rarity value to be found here either.
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| N |
.NET
Said "dot Net". A software development and execution environment
designed by Microsoft as a direct competitor to Java. .NET's
main weakness is that Microsoft have ignored the Unix and mainframe
environments, effectively ruling .NET out of use in many enterprises.
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| O |
ODS
Operational Data Store
One-to-one, 1-to-1
Marketing philosophy devised and promoted by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers.
At its simplest, takes the direct marketing tendency of ever tighter targeting
to its logical conclusion, the segment of one. Frequently shared a platform
with CRM in the nineties. While CRM, a heavily vendor driven movement,
became (in the end disastrously) associated with the technology, 1-to-1
retained a clear focus on the customer.
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| P |
PAF
Postal Address Format. The post offices own standard for (effectively)
every address in the UK. The PAF file is available through resellers, and
forms an essential tool in managing addresses in the database.
Post Code
Direct marketers in the UK have long been thanking their lucky stars for
the relative rigour of the post offices excellent system of postcodes.
(If you don’t think postcodes are great you evidently haven’t
had to try to get a handle on managing French addresses, or had customers
in Eire)
The post code is divided into levels:
Area OX
District OX13
Sector OX13 6
Unit OX13 6AG
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| Q |
Quality Assurance (QA)
In developing products and services, quality assurance is any systematic process of checking to see whether a
product or service being developed is meeting specified requirements. Many companies have a separate department
devoted to quality assurance. A quality assurance system is said to increase customer confidence and a company's
credibility, to improve work processes and efficiency, and to enable a company to better compete with others.
Quality assurance was initially introduced in World War II when munitions were inspected and tested for defects
after they were made. Today's quality assurance systems emphasize catching defects before they get into the final product.
QA is the term used to describe quality procedures while a product or service is in development. Once it is in production
this tends to be refered to as Quality Control. Both QA and QC are essential to the information products engineered from
an organisations data resource, and both tend to be woefully under-addressed.
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| R |
Rapid Address Capture
A piece of software, usually integrated with customer service front end
systems, that populates the full (PAF) address from only some elements
(postcode and house number is the clasic combination).
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| S |
Segmentation Methods
There are two principal methods of performing segmentation, differentiated
by the extent to which the user of the method defines in advance the segments
involved:
|
|
A priori segmentation, which defines, in advance,a framework
that is based on known charateristics of customers or prospects. |
|
|
Cluster segmentation, which ( in direct contrast to the a
priori method) seeks to discover naturally ocurring clusters
of customers that share common charateristics or behave in
the same way.
Source: Comhra |
Shelfware
Software that on first use turns out to be over complex, poor in functionality,
bug filled or all three, and ends up sitting unused in some dusty corner
of the office.
SIC
Standard Industrial Classification. The United Kingdom 'Standard
Industrial Classification' system was first introduced in 1948
as a Government initiative. Its aim was to build a system that
grouped all like activities together in order to provide a uniform
framework for the collection and analysis of data relating to
the performance of the postwar economy. Today it provides the
ability to give each company within the UK a code that identifies
their business activity.
SIC Codes are arranged in a very structured, hierarchical
manner:
The first digit designates a major
Economic Division, such as Agriculture or Manufacturing.
The second digit designates an Economic
Major Group, such as Crop Production.
The third digit designates an Industry
Group, such as Grains or Fruits.
The fourth digit fine tunes the
hierarchical structure into a Specific Industry
The SIC coding system was updated in 1958, 1968, 1980 and
again in 1992 to take account of new industries. The 1992
update was an E.C directive, the first 4 digits of which are
identical to the NACE (General Industry of Economic Activities
within the European Communities) coding system. The system is also
identical to the United Nations system ISIC at the two digit Divisional level.
Every update has reflected the economy and boom industries
of that particular era. The 1992 codes highlight the recent
growth in the service, commercial and financial sectors, whereas
the 1980 codes are stronger in the engineering and manufacturing
industries.
The next revision of the UK SIC is scheduled for 2007
Click
here for list
There is also a US version.
In 1999, the United States Government started to change the
way they collected business statistics. Instead of gathering
statistics based on traditional SIC Codes, they began to implement
a new system, called the North American Industry Classification
System (NAICS Codes).
NAICS and SIC are similar in concept, but the newer NAICS
codes always contain 6 digits, and cover a much wider variety
of industries, technologies, products and services, than the
older SIC code system. NAICS identifies hundreds of new, emerging,
and advanced technology industries. And NAICS reorganizes
industries into more meaningful sectors - especially in the
service-producing segments of the economy. Unlike the system
of SIC Codes which was used only in the United States, the
NAICS was designed by a joint agreement between USA, Canada
and Mexico.
For more information on the relationship between national coding
systems than you are ever likely to need: Click
here
SFA
Sales Force Automation.
SOA
Service Oriented Architecture.
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| T |
TLA
Three Letter Acronym (Nerd irony)
TPS
Telephone Preference Service.The place where people register their desire
to avoid telemarketing calls. Now also relevant in business-to-business,
in the form of the Corporate Telephone Preference Service. TPS screening
is available from all good bureaux and data vendors.
Transformation
The T in ETL.
The process of reengineering data to fit into a new data structure.
Typically the biggest transformation for marketing data is moving from
an architecture based around account numbers to one based around individual
customers
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| U |
User
A four letter word. Avoid it wherever you can. If you are in the business
of managing information and think of those to whom you are delivering information,
as largely passive recipients or consumers stop and think again.
The following definition from Larry English is long but quoted here in
full as it completely turns inside out the mindset that the word user tends
to engender
"User; An unfortunate term used by many to refer to the role of people to information
technology, computer systems or data. The term implies dependence on something,
or one who has no choice, or one who is inactively involved in the use of something.
The term is inappropriate to describe the role of information producers and knowledge
workers who perform the work of the enterprise, and for whom information technology
should enable them to transform their work, and for whom information is a necessay
and vital resource. With respect to information technology, applications, and
data, the role of business personnel is that of information producers and knowledge
workers. The relationship of business personnel to information systems personnel
is not as users, but as partners who together solve the information and work problems
of the enterprise."
As to the idea of information consumers, remember that information
is the only asset in the organisation that can be used without
being consumed.
In fact it is information which consumes: "What information consumes is
rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth
of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that
attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that
might consume it. " (Herbert Simon)
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| V |
Vapourware
Software which at best is still in development, and at worst is no more
than an interesting concept in the mind of someone at the vendor organisation.
Vapourware is sometimes announced with great fanfare as a spoiling tactic
to hurt sales of a competitors already launched product (see FUD). Sometimes
a vendor is so enthusiastic that they will actually sell you vapourware
and then catch up with creating the actual product on your time (and given
the chance, at your premises and with your money).
The really big vendors of ERP and CRM systems are particularly adept at
selling products which are effectively the equivalent of a three wheeled
car, and then charging the client for an army of consultants who come along
to build and fit the fourth wheel.
|
| W |
WOMBAT
Another useful acronym from the hacker community. Stands for "Waste of Money Brains and Time".
|
| X |
XML
Generalised Mark-up Language.
|
| Y |
YABA
Yet Another Bloody Acronym.
|
| Z |
Zachman Framework
A widely accepted framework designed by John Zachman to help organisations
create an Enterprise Architecture - a holistic approach to developing and
managing information systems that will obviate the need for constantly
integrating disparate databases, applications and information processes.
"The Enterprise must produce... models in order to deliver systems implementations
in the short term, and at the same time for the long term, instantiate the Architecture
process in order to ensure on-going coherence of system implementations and to
build an Enterprise environment conducive to accommodating high rates of change." Zachman
Institute for Framework Advancement
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"...an invaluable
compendium of information on the most pressing challenge in
business today"
Sean Kelly
Comhra |
 |
"At last! Something
on data even an old Luddite like me can understand!"
Drayton Bird |
|
"...a really useful resource to understanding all issues relating
to data management"
Prof Derek Holder
Institute of
Direct
Marketing |
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"...a down-to-earth, no-nonsense site designed to cover the
new practices and theory of Information Management"
Simon Lawrence
Information Arts |
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