Page 570 - Using MIS

538 Glossary

Bits The means by which computers represent data; also Business-to-business (B2B) Relationships through which
called binary digits. A bit is either a zero or a one. 117 businesses generate new retail leads. 301
BlackBerry OS One of the most successful early mobile op- Business-to-consumer (B2C) Relationships through which
erating systems; was primarily used by business users on businesses market their products to end users. 301
BlackBerry devices. 128 Bytes (1) 8-bit chunks of data. (2) Characters of data. 118
Bluetooth A common wireless protocol designed for trans- Cable line Cable television lines that provide high-speed
mitting data over short distances, replacing cables. 215 data transmission. 217
Bring your own device (BYOD) policy An official orga- Capital Resources that are invested with the expectation of
nizational policy that states employees’ permissions and future gain. 302
responsibilities when using personal mobile devices for
organizational business. 146 Carrier A telecommunications company that provides voice
and data transportation services. 217
Brooks’ Law The famous adage that states: Adding more
people to a late project makes the project later. Brooks’ Law Cassandra A durable, nonrelational data store that operates
is true not only because a larger staff requires increased co- over hundreds or thousands of servers. Originally devel-
ordination, but also because new people need to be trained. oped by Facebook but later turned over to the open source
The only people who can train the new employees are the community; has become an Apache Top Level Project
existing team members, who are thus taken off productive (TLP). 188
tasks. The costs of training new people can overwhelm the Central processing unit (CPU) The portion of a computer
benefit of their contributions. 481 that selects instructions, processes them, performs arith-
Brute force attack A password-cracking program that tries metic and logical comparisons, and stores results of opera-
every possible combination of characters. 397 tions in memory. 116
Chief information officer (CIO) The title of the principal
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Standard set
of terms and graphical notations for documenting business manager of the IS department. Other common titles are vice
processes. 464 president of information services, director of information ser-
vices, and, less commonly, director of computer services. 430
Business analyst (1) A person who understands business
strategies, goals, and objectives and who helps businesses Chief information security officer (CISO) The title of the
develop and manage business processes and information person who manages security for the organization’s infor-
systems. (2) Someone who is well versed in Porter’s models, mation systems and information. 431
organizational strategy, and systems alignment theory, like Chief security officer (CSO) The title of the person who
COBIT, and who also understands technology sufficiently manages security for all of the organization’s assets: physi-
well to communicate with developers. 460 cal plant and equipment, employees, intellectual property,
Business intelligence (BI) systems Information systems that and digital. 431
process operational and other source data to identify patterns, Chief technology officer (CTO) The title of the head of the
relationships, and trends and to make predictions. 340 technology group. The CTO filters new ideas and products
Business intelligence (BI) The processing of operational and to identify those that are most relevant to the organization.
other data to create information that exposes patterns, rela- The CTO’s job requires deep knowledge of information
tionships, and trends of importance to the organization. 340 technology and the ability to envision how new IT could af-
fect an organization over time. 431
Business process management (BPM) A cyclical process
for systematically creating, assessing, and altering business Client PCs, tablets, and smartphones that access servers via
processes. 462 the cloud. 117
Business process reengineering The activity of altering exist- Closed source Source code that is highly protected and
ing and designing new business processes to take advantage of only available to trusted employees and carefully vetted
the capabilities of new information systems technology. 261 contractors. 135

Business process (1) A network of activities that generate Cloud A term that refers to elastic leasing of pooled com-
value by transforming inputs into outputs. (2) A network of puter resources over the Internet. 211
activities, repositories, roles, resources, and flows that inter- Cluster analysis Unsupervised data mining using statistical
act to achieve some business function; sometimes called a techniques to identify groups of entities that have similar
business system 90, 461 characteristics. A common use for cluster analysis is to find