| Glossary
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| Chapter 2
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| business intelligence
| The subset of data and information that actually has some explanatory power enabling effective decisions to be made.
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| content providers
| Parties that furnish information on the World Wide Web.
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| cookies
| Small computer files that a content provider can save onto the computer of someone who visits its website.
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| customer relationship management
| The part of the DSS that addresses exchanges between the firm and its customers.
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| data
| Facts or recorded measures of certain phenomena (things).
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| data quality
| The degree to which data represent the true situation.
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| data warehouse
| The multitiered computer storehouse of current and historical data.
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| data warehousing
| The process allowing important day-to-day operational data to be stored and organized for simplified access.
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| data wholesalers
| Companies that put together consortia of data sources into packages that are offered to municipal, corporate, and university libraries for a fee.
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| database
| A collection of raw data arranged logically and organized in a form that can be stored and processed by a computer.
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| decision support system
| A computer-based system that helps decision makers confront problems through direct interaction with databases and analytical software programs.
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| electronic data interchange
| Type of exchange that occurs when one company’s computer system is integrated with another company’s system.
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| environmental scanning
| Entails all information gathering designed to detect changes in the external operating environment of the�firm.
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| global information system
| An organized collection of computer hardware, software, data, and personnel designed to capture, store, update, manipulate, analyze, and immediately display information about worldwide business activity.
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| host
| Where the content for a particular website physically resides and is accessed.
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| information
| Data formatted (structured) to support decision making or define the relationship between two facts.
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| information completeness
| Having the right amount of information.
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| interactive medium
| A medium, such as the Internet, that a person can use to communicate with and interact with other users.
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| Internet
| A worldwide network of computers that allows users access to information from distant sources.
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| intranet
| A company’s private data network that uses Internet standards and technology.
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| keyword search
| Takes place as the search engine searches through millions of web pages for documents containing the keywords.
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| knowledge
| A blend of previous experience, insight, and data that forms organizational memory.
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| knowledge management
| The process of creating an inclusive, comprehensive, easily accessible organizational memory, which is often called the organization’s intellectual capital.
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| proprietary business research
| The gathering of new data to investigate specific problems.
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| pull technology
| Consumers request information from a web page and the browser then determines a response; the consumer is essentially asking for the data.
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| push technology
| Sends data to a user’s computer without a request being made; software is used to guess what information might be interesting to consumers based on the pattern of previous responses.
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| relevance
| A characteristic of data reflecting how pertinent these particular facts are to the situation at hand.
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| scanner data
| The accumulated records resulting from point-of-sale data recordings.
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| search engine
| A computerized directory that allows anyone to search the World Wide Web for information using a keyword search.
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| smart agent software
| Software capable of learning an Internet user’s preferences and automatically searching out information in selected websites and then distributing it.
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| timeliness
| Means that the data are current enough to still be relevant.
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| uniform resource locator
| A website address that web browsers recognize.
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| World Wide Web
| A portion of the Internet that is a system of computer servers that organize information into documents called web pages.
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