Chapter 17

virus

a program or piece of code that, without your knowledge, attaches itself to other programs on your computer and can trigger anything from a harmless flashing message to the reformatting of your hard drive to a system-wide network shutdown.

Information is useful when it is

accurate, complete, relevant, and timely.

extranet

allows companies to exchange information and conduct transactions by purposely providing outsiders with direct, web browser-based access to authorized parts of a company's intranet or information system. Typically, user names and passwords are required to access an extranet.

Corporate portals

are a hybrid of executive information systems and intranets, allow company managers and employees to access customized information and complete specialized transactions using a web browser.

Expert systems

are created by capturing the specialized knowledge and decision rules used by experts and experienced decision makers. They permit non-expert employees to draw on this expert knowledge base to make decisions. Most expert systems work by using a collection of "if-then" rules to sort through information and recommend a course of action.

Firewalls

are hardware or software devices that sit between the computers in an internal organizational network and outside networks such as the Internet. They filter and check incoming and outgoing data.

Predictive patterns

are just the opposite of association or affinity patterns instead they help identify database elements that are different.

Intranets

are private company networks that allow employees to easily access, share, and publish information using Internet software. They are just like external websites, but the firewall separating the internal company network from the Internet permits only authorized internal access.

Electronic storage devices

bar codes, radio frequency identification tags, and document scanners are used to capture and record data electronically

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags

contain minuscule microchips and antennas that transmit information via radio waves. Unlike bar codes, which require direct line-of-sight scanning, RFID tags are read by turning on an RFID reader that, like a radio, tunes into a specific frequency to determine the number and location of products, parts, or anything else to which the RFID tags are attached.

Electronic scanners

convert printed text and pictures into digital images, have become an increasingly popular method of capturing data electronically because they are inexpensive and easy to use.

secure sockets layer (SSL)

encryption to provide secure off-site access to data and programs.

Raw data

facts and figures.

biometrics

fingerprint recognition or iris scanning, where users are identified by unique, measurable body features.

authorization

granting authenticated users approved access to data, software, and systems.

decision support system (DSS)

helps managers understand problems and potential solutions by acquiring and analyzing information with sophisticated models and tools. are usually narrow in scope and targeted toward helping managers solve specific kinds of problems.

Manual capture of information

is a slow, costly, labor-intensive, and often inaccurate process, which entails recording and entering data by hand into a data storage device.

Capturing Information

is done through manual or electronic methodology.

Data mining

is the process of discovering patterns and relationships in large amounts of data. Data mining works by using complex algorithms such as neural networks, rule induction, and decision trees.

authentication

makes sure users are who they claim to be.

Processing Information

means transforming raw data into meaningful information that can be applied to business decision making.

Data clusters

occur when three or more database elements occur together (i.e., cluster) in a significant way

Sequence patterns

occur when two or more database elements occur together in a significant pattern in which one of the elements precedes the other.

Association or affinity patterns

occur when two or more database elements tend to occur together in a significant way.

Bar codes

represent numerical data by varying the thickness and pattern of vertical bars. The primary advantage of bar codes is that the data they represent can be read and recorded in an instant with a handheld or pen-type scanner.

Virtual private network (VPN)

software that securely encrypts data sent by employees outside the company network, decrypts the data when they arrive within the company computer network, and does the same when data are sent back to employees outside the network.

Data warehouses

store huge amounts of data that have been prepared for data mining analysis by being cleaned of errors and redundancy. The data in a data warehouse can then be analyzed using the following two kinds of data mining, supervised or unsupervised

optical character recognition

the ability of software to convert digitized documents into ASCII text that can be searched, read, and edited, by word processing software as well as other kinds of software

Retrieval cost

the cost of accessing already-stored and processed information.

Acquisition cost

the cost of obtaining data that you don't have.

Storage cost

the cost of physically or electronically archiving information for later use and retrieval.

Communication cost

the cost of transmitting information from one place to another.

Processing cost

the cost of turning raw data into usable information.

Moore's law

the prediction that about every two years, computer processing power would double and its cost would drop by 50 percent. Moore made this prediction in 1965.

Protecting Information

the process of ensuring that data are reliably and consistently retrievable in a usable format for authorized users but no one else. Two critical steps are required to make sure that data can be accessed by authorized users and no one else, authentication and authorization

First-mover advantage

the strategic advantage that companies earn by being the first in an industry to use new information technology to substantially lower costs or to differentiate a product or service from that of competitors

Unsupervised data mining

the user simply tells the data mining software to uncover whatever patterns and relationships it can find in a data set. is good at identifying association or affinity patterns, sequence patterns, and predictive patterns.

Data encryption

transforms data into complex, scrambled digital codes that can be unencrypted only by authorized users who possess unique decryption keys.

electronic data interchange

two companies convert purchase and ordering information to a standardized format to enable direct electronic transmission of that information from one company's computer system to the other company's system.

Web services

use standardized protocols to describe and transfer data from one company in such a way that those data can automatically be read, understood, transcribed, and processed by different computer systems in another company.

Information

useful data that can influence someone's choices and behavior. One way to think about the difference between data and information is that information has context.

Executive information system (EIS)

uses internal and external sources of data to provide managers and executives the information they need to monitor and analyze organizational performance.

Supervised data mining

usually begins with the user telling the data mining software to look and test for specific patterns and relationships in a data set. Typically, this is done through a series of "what-if" questions or statements.

Two-factor authentication

which is based on what users know, such as a password, and what they have, such as a secure ID card.