Information Systems concepts

API: Application Programming Interface: standard set of functions and tools to access to a local or distant service.

Information Systems Architecture: Information Systems structure, organization. It describes the Information Systems cut in distinct sub-systems, the flows exchanged between these systems, their integration according to an urbanism map and the technologic support used.

Distributed architecture: Network architecture where the functions are decentralized at the nodes level which constitute the network. Each node is in charge of a treatment part.

N-Tier Architecture: Logical decomposition of client-server applications containing N levels.

Facilities Management: Policy consisting in rely on a specialized company to take care of the information's system evolution and management which is in charge during a few years of the whole or a part of the information system.

System Integration: Fixing of the information system to apply in order to communicate with the existing system and to match it with the company business.

Procedure: Serie of rules to apply to achieve successfully an operation.

CASE: Computer Aided Software Engineering: tools set designed to improve the software analysis, conception, implementation and productivity.

Steering committee: The steering committee is an active structure whose the number of participants is reduced to be efficient. It mainly takes place during the achievement of a project as a good project sequence controller. His members are chosen by the contracting owner and can come from the project team, particularly the finance persons.

RAD: Rapid Application Development: Iterative and incremental method of computing applications development project piloting, with quality delay reduction and cost control objectives.

GANTT Diagram: Tool allowing to plan a project and to make it more easy to follow the progress. It permits to easily visualize the project sequence, and to foresee sufficiently early the correction to achieve.

Project Manager: In charge of a process which initiates, drives and closes a project. He is mainly responsible of the whole planning, the project development monitoring and control from the launching to the conclusion. So he is responsible of the productivity level but also of the risk in place.

Analysis phase: Project management step, whose objective is to identify the best approach to develop the system adapted to the organization.

Design phase: Project management step whose objective is to develop a rigorous model for the new system.

Construction and implementation phase: Project management step, whose objective is to build a new system and to integrate it in the organization.

Project management: Art consisting in running and coordinate the material and human ressources, since the project preparation and all the long of its duration, using management technics to reach the established objectives in advance according to cost, delay, priorities, quality and satisfaction of the participants (stakeholders).

Life cycle overview: Discipline establishing schedule, analysis, conception and implementation rules and methodology of a project in the matter of information system. Each phase is verified by the steering committee and sanctioned by an audit and a deliverable.

Program management: Coordinated management of a projects group with the objective to achieve profits which have a strategic value for the organization.

Business intelligence: Technologies group allowing the management and the analysis of computing data with the objective to provide an help to the comprehension, to the prediction or to the decision.

Management cockpit: Group of management methods allowing companies heads to make decisions quickly in complex and moving environments.

Steering: Art to guide, drive and advice, orient, show the direction, take and help to make economic and technical choices the most judicious. It must permit to the company to gain in reactivity, to develop synergies, to better communicate, to be competitive.

Reverse engineering: Method consisting in analyze a program or a peripheral feature to make it understandable by a human.

JAD: Joint Application Development: computing project management technic allowing to ease the project running.

Deliverable: Document showing the achievement of a step (or of a batch of jobs), constituting a milestone inside a project.

Function point method: Metric allowing to measure the size of an application. The measure of the complexity of the application features gives a weight, a number of function points. It is used in the pre-study phase of an application where few elements are already known and it is above all concepts which are manipulated. It is based on the logical conception of the application and is independent of the used language.

PERT Diagram: PERT means Program of Evaluation and Review Technique. It is a tool used in project management allowing to underline and to anticipate the critical points of a project. This diagram will allow having more information particularly about the cost and delaying monitoring and the project tasks coordination. Other names: PERT, PERT network.

RUP: Rational Unified Process: Development processes of information systems and software applications covering the whole life cycle.

EIS: Executive Information System: dashboard instrument allowing to exploit essential information of a base and to visualize the key indicators. Reserved before for the high executives, it became more accessible and the acronym has a different meaning nowadays: Everyone Information System or more globally Executive/Enterprise/Everyone's Information/Intelligence System/Service/Software.

Reporting: Quick and reliable of information return and processing system, in a indicator sum-up form or analysis report, whose objectives are above all to help the manager to take a decision and to inform the partners.

Simulation: Reproduction of a system with all his process in an experimental model to know what is transposable to the reality.

Statistics: Investigation domain whose objective is to collect and order the fact data or the numerical values linked to human business or natural phenomena.

Expert system or Knowledge-based system: For a given domain, an expert system is an application able to achieve logical argument similar to those that would be done by human expert. A such system can help to make a decision.

Balanced scorecard: Dashboard allowing first to sum-up the activity at the company general direction level and in the other hand to line the activity with the strategy. This analysis is achieved following four axes.

Knowledge/Competences tree: Dynamic representation, in a tree form, of all the skills acquired by a person or a group of actors of the same community.

Decision tree: Schema used to represent a choice problematic in a structured manner.

KB: Knowledge Base: structured information, knowledge and experiences group related to an organization on a particular topic.

Knowledge Capitalization: Process of company collaborators individual knowledge formalization. These knowledge become in that way explicit and collective.

CKO: Chief Knowledge Officer: Person in charge of the company knowledge management.

Common KADS: Common Knowledge acquisition and documentation structuring: Knowledge modeling method centered on the acquiring process which assures all the features from the knowledge collect to the whole system development.

Competence, Know-how: Group of knowledge, action and behavior abilities structured according to a goal and a given situation type (For example, react to the long term general failing rates).

Knowledge: Ability to act obtained by an intelligent process (for example market trend obtained with brut data and information on the companies listed on the stock exchange).

E-learning: New concept of training by Internet or Intranet combining communication, education and information.

Competitive intelligence: Group of search, processing and distribution coordinated actions to exploit it from the useful information to the economic actors.

KM: Knowledge Management: Management of the individual and collective knowledge of the company.

KOD: Knowledge Oriented Design: Method proposing a knowledge collect and modeling frame. It permits to transport the knowledge in machine usable information.

Corporate knowledge: Group of knowledge and know-how in action, mobilized by the company employees to get it to its objectives.

MKSM: Method for knowledge system management: Method which permits to conceptualize the company knowledge system.

Cognitive sciences: Group of sciences which concerns the knowledge and its process: psychology, linguistic, neurobiology, logic, computing.

Database concept: Entity inside which it is possible to stock information in a structured manner with the minimum of redundancy.

CRM: Customer Relationship Management: Computing tool developed to allow a company to secure the loyalty of its customers and to increase its market places, integrating the management of the data related to the customers' expectations, in a context of sales and after-sales, online or not.

Datamining: Extraction of original information or knowledge which were unknown before and potentially useful for a consequent data volume.

Data: Objective and Discrete element resulting of an acquisition, a measure and which can be qualitative (For example: the sky is blue) or quantitative (the exterior temperature is 20degree Celsius).

EDI: Electronic Data Interchange: Normalized structuration of the B2B data exchanges. It eases the information system interoperability by allowing the dialog, thanks to EDIFACT, between applications based on different norms.

DWH: Datawarehouse: Collection of thematic, integrated, no volatile and history-ordered data from production databases to help to the decision making.

Information: Data collection organized to give to a message a visible, through picture, written, oral form (for example a paper document, notes written during a meeting).

AI: Artificial Intelligence for datamining: Science which studies the program building which demonstrates an intelligent behavior which can be noticed by humans.

Application: Group of computing programs which are used to help a user to do a specific job.

EAI: Enterprise Application Integration: Group of company application interfacing tools. Abbreviation which contains all the tools able to integrate company applications such as ERP, SCM and CRM.

ERP: Enterprise Resources planning: Company major computing integration system. The ERP is about the company integration management system, based on a customizable integrated software.

GNU/Linux: Operating system similar to Unix, multitask, multiusers for machines with Intel-AMD-Cyrix, Alpha, PowerMAc processors opened to networks and to other operating systems.

Man machine interface: Group of hardware and software devices allowing a user to dialog with a computing system.

J2EE: Java 2 platform enterprise edition: Technology and/or environment describing platform specifications for the multitier (multilayers) applications development.

Free software: Software family corresponding to a particular license, defining the freedom to copy, redistribute and access to these software source code.

Middleware: Software class which is the intermediate between the applications and assure the data transport by the network.

Software package: Complete and documented group of programs designed to be provided to several users into the same application or into the same function.

RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or independent) Disks: Enhanceable stocking technology offering significant advantages in performance, capacity, reliability and scalability.

Unix: Operating system which is multitask, multiuser, portable and based on the process time sharing. Unix can manage the tasks and proposes a programmable user interface.

Extranet: Private computing network similar to Internet, whose access is restricted to some persons or some organization outside the company.

ISP: Internet Service Provider: Company which permits to private individual and to companies to connect themselves to Internet in exchange of a subscription fees.

GSM: Global System for Mobile communications: Norm concerning mobile telephony communication systems and networks.

Groupware: Set of decided process and procedures of a group to reach precise objectives, and helped by computing tools easing the group work.

Internet: Network collection based on the packet transport and allowing the information exchange.

Intranet: Intern computing network providing secure and controllable access to information, databases, enterprise resources, thanks to the open technology of Internet.

Browser: Software whose the first function is to interpret the webpages address, to display it and to exploit the hypertext links inside these ones. (Similarly with the web 'server', we could considerate it as the web 'client').

Net economy: Economy founded on the Internet development and the new information and communication technologies. It generates changes on the whole process by which the services and goods are designed, exchanged and consumed.

Newsgroup: It permits to Internet users to exchange their point of view on different subjects. The exchanges are done thanks to written messages sent by email then they are stocked on news server.

RFC: Request For Comment: Electronic documents set defining technical specifications on the protocols, existing services, etc. They are more or less references on which each protocol is supposed to base on when it desires to implement a code using these protocols or services.

Webmarketing: Contains all the different actions (referencing, partnership, publicity, emailing ...) which permits to a company to increase the notoriety the accessibility and the visibility of its site. Known also as cybermarketing.

XNET: Generic name of front office information system, designing either Internet, an Extranet, an intranet or the combining of two or three of these network models.

ASP: Active Server Pages: Standard defined by Microsoft allowing the development of dynamic webpages through included scripts inside HTML pages and interpreted by a webserver which send it to the clients. These scripts can be written in different languages, but are generally developed in VBScript.

CGI: Common Gateway Interface: Interfacing norm between a HTTP server and applications located on the server side to create dynamic HTML pages.

CORBA: Common Object Request Broker Architecture: Opened norm allowing applications to communicate between themselves, where they are and whatever their creator. CORBA is an answer of the Object Management Group to the interoperability needs between the software and hardware products available nowadays and which are proliferating.

Software component: Computing system element which is part of a software or which constitutes a sub-group of a software or program. It is also called software element, software component to not mix up with 'component software'.);

EJB: Enterprise Java Beans: Business Java component software architecture. Designed to develop distributed applications, this technology is part of the J2EE platform.

XML: EXtensible Markup Language: Extensible metalanguage from SGML allowing to structure data.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language: Normalized language based on the tag principle, designed to publish on Internet (World Wide Web) structured documents allowing to express, in a system independent manner, presentation attributes like the characters appearance (normal, bold, dark ...), the size in points, the paragraphs presentation (justified, on the left ...), pictures, etc. and links to other documents.

Java: 'Object' programming language, in opposition to C++ which is 'Object oriented'. It is an interpreted, distributed, reliable, portable, multi-architecture, multithread, dynamic language. Its principal advantage is to be completely portable (so in several platforms) and one of the reasons of its success is its possibility to insert it inside HTML documents in an applet form thanks to the Java Virtual Machine and a strict security policy.

Linear programming: Group of mathematical methods whose aim is to maximize or to minimize an economic objective say a linear function under some technical constraints. This is used to resolve numerous problems in management, logistics and computing.

Neural network: Originally, intent to mathematically design the human brain. Used in the decision assistance, the scheduling, the compression, the meteorological forecast and the form recognition.

SOAP: Light information exchange protocol in a distributed and decentralized environment, based on XML, and allowing notably to call distant applications.

SQL: Structured Query Language: Structured on the relational algebra and calculus, the structured query language is a data definition language, a data manipulation language, a data control language designed to manage the databases and interrogate them. A SQL query is a question to the database about the data of this one or an action on this data (create, update, delete).

Real Time System: System with high time constraints, which interacts with an extern environment which changes (according to the time)

UML: Unified Modeling Language: Unification organized by the creators, of the designing modeling method the most used until there. This standard, from a consensus, is just fine for communication between workgroups. UML has become an OMG standard.

B To A: Business To Administration: Relation between a company and an administration.

B To B: Business To Business: products, services and information exchanges between companies thanks to Intranet, Internet or Extranet.

B To C: Business To Consumer: business relation between a company and a private individual.

B To E: Business To Employee: E-business activity about the relationship between a company and an employee. The B To E traduces the idea that the company has to treat its employees like consumers by providing them services.

B To R: Business To Retailer: Business relation between a company and a distribution network, it is included in the Business To Business.

Call Center: Entity dedicated to the customer relation management (information, assistance, teleshopping)

E Business: Group of commercial operations achieved by people and organizations, without paper documents, thanks to computers and private or public telecommunication networks.

E organization: This concept refers to organizations which used New Technologies of communication and information to achieve their work.

E procurement: On-lining of the invitation to tender to globalize the buying and reduce the costs.

Learning Organization: Company which learns and encourage the learning among the people which composed it.

One to one: Marketing concept based on a customized communication with an individual consumer considered unique.

Matrix Organization: Company structure, where the employees are under a double responsibility which depends first by its mission, and secondly by the common resources they invoke.

MarketPlace: Website completely dedicated to commerce between companies