Back-out Plan
A plan that specifies the steps required to recover to a known working state if a change or release fails.
Bad Data
Data that is not accurate or in some other way is misleading.
Balanced Scorecard
Balanced scorecard methodology is an analysis technique designed to translate an organization's mission statement and overall business strategy into specific, quantifiable goals and to monitor the organization's performance in terms of achieving these goals. Developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 1992, the balanced scorecard methodology is a comprehensive approach that analyzes an organization's overall performance in four ways, based on theea that assessing performance through financial returns only provides information about how well the organization did prior to the assessment, so that future performance can be predicted and proper actions taken to create the desired future. (SearchCIO definition)
Baseline
A snapshot of the state of a process, service, or item frozen at a point in time for a particular purpose; a marker against which change is measured.
Batch Processing
Data processing that occurs on sets of data, at scheduled times. It is a different approach from real-time processing, where data is manipulated one record at a time.
Benchmarking
A technique in which a company measures its performance against that of best in class companies, determines how those companies achieved their performance levels and uses the information to improve its own performance. Subjects that can be benchmarked include strategies, operations and processes.
Benchmarking
The use of information about other organizations or efforts, used for comparisons and to set standards and goals.
Best Practice
An activity, process, or approach that has been proven successful over time.
Best-Of-Breed
The best product of its type. Organizations often purchase software from different vendors to obtain the best-of-breed offering for each application area.
Beta
Early phases of a testing program or product release before making available to the general public.
BI
acronym for Business Intelligence
BIA
see Business Impact Analysis
Board Of Directors
The collective group of individuals elected by the shareholders of a corporation to oversee the management of the corporation. (CorporateLibrary.com definition)
Board of Trustees
A group of people responsible for the oversight of a non-profit organization. (CorporateLibrary.com definition)
BPA
see Business Process Automation
BPM
see Business Process Management or Business Process Modeling
British Standards Institution (BSI)
The UK National Standards body, responsible for creating and maintaining British Standards. See ISO.
BRML
Business Rules Markup Language - Emerging standard for managing business rules in an XML format.
BS 15000
British Standards Institution Specification and Code of Practice for IT Service Management. BS 15000 is based on ITIL Best Practice, and has been superseded by ISO/IEC 20000.
BS 7799
British Standards Institution Specification and Code of Practice for Information Security Management. BS 7799 has been superseded by ISO/IEC 17799 and ISO/IEC 27001.
Business Architecture
One of the four types of enterprise architectures. A business architecture describes the functions a business performs and the information it uses, and it concentrates on integrating and optimizing processes.
Business Case
Business justification for pursuing a particular business request.
Business Continuity Management (BCM)
Business Continuity Management is the Business Process which sets the Objectives, Scope and Requirements for IT Service Continuity Management. BCM is responsible for managing Risks that could seriously impact the Business. BCM ensures that the Business can always Operate to a minimum agreed level, by reducing the Risk to an acceptable level and Planning to Restore Business Processes. (Baseline ITIL definition)
Business Driver
Something that influences a business strategy or objective
Business Impact Analysis
BIAentifies the cost (financial and nonfinancial) should a set of business processes not functioning correctly. It is used in preparing a disaster recovery plan (DRP) or a business continuity plan (BCP).
Business Intelligence
An interactive process for exploring and analyzing structured, domain-specific information (often stored in data warehouses) to discern trends or patterns, thereby deriving insights and drawing conclusions. The BI process includes communicating findings and effecting change. Domains include customers, suppliers, products, services and competitors. (Gartner definition)
Business Intelligence Analyst / Administrator
A person who is responsible for evaluating and analyzing data used to make business decisions, or a person who supports business intelligence systems and data.
Business Intelligence Architect
A senior Business Intelligence Analyst typically responsible for the design of the business intelligence environment.
Business Process
At a high level, a process owned and carried out by the business.
Business Process Automation
see Business Process Automation
Business Process Management
A general term describing a set of services and tools that provide for explicit process management, including process analysis, definition, execution, monitoring and administration. Ideally, BPM should include support for both human and application-level interactions. The workflow market has been a significant source of BPM, although forms of BPM are now emerging from many other sources, such as collaborative applications, integration brokers, Web integration servers, development tools, rules engines and e-commerce offerings. (Gartner definition)
Business Process Management
The management of complex interactions between people, applications and technologies in a business designed to create customer value.
Business Process Modeling
A process that links business strategy to IT systems development to ensure business value. It combines process/workflow, functional, organizational and data/resource views with underlying metrics such as costs, cycle times and responsibilities to provide a foundation for analyzing value chains, activity-based costs, bottlenecks, critical paths and inefficiencies. (Gartner definition)
Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
The discipline and activities focussed on improving business processes to deliver outputs that will achieve results meeting the firm's objectives, priorities and mission.
Business Relationship Managers
IT liaisons with business groups responsible forentifying needs, managing expectations and negotiating priorities.
Business Rule
A statearialment that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. Business rules may start as business policies, goals, strategies and guidelines; they are expressed as declarative statements, constraints or predicated actions. Business rules are used to create database, application, or process logic. They are often managed with a Business Rules Engine.
Business Unit
A segment of an organization which has its own plans, metrics, income and costs.
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