Industry News, Jargon and Organizations

Terminology and Jargon

 * Business Intelligence
 * Business intelligence (BI) refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context (it may also refer to the collected information itself). BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics. Since BI aims to support better business decision-making, a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).


 * Master Data
 * Master Data is a single source of basic business data used across multiple systems, applications, and/or processes. This information may include data about customers, products, employees, materials, suppliers, etc., and is generally non-transactional in nature. Master data is often used by multiple functional groups, may be stored across multiple data systems in an organization, and may not necessarily be referenced centrally (although desirable for consistency). Master Data Management (MDM) refers to the set of processes and tools for defining and managing master data.


 * Material Requirements Planning (MRP)
 * MRP is a a process involving calculating the quantity of the various raw materials that must be ordered in order to fulfill a set of product orders. The MRP process generally consists of four steps: 1) Bill of Materials Explosion - looking backward from each product, determine which intermediates and raw materials are required, and in what quantities. 2) Netting - compare the above quantities against current inventory. 3) Lot Sizing - determine how the needed materials will be purchased or produced. 4) Start Date Determination - based on cycle time information, determine when each order should start production.


 * Reference Data (or Master Reference Data)
 * Reference Data is at a "higher level" than Master Data, changing more slowly and often not dependent on the organization using it (e.g., a list of countries of the world used to report sales revenue by country).


 * Requirements Management
 * Requirements management is the process of eliciting, documenting, analyzing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders. It is a continuous process throughout a project. A requirement is a capability to which a project outcome (product or service) should conform.

Document Control

 * AIIM http://www.aiim.org/
 * "AIIM is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information." "For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. AIIM was founded in 1943 as the National Microfilm Association and later became the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM is also known as the enterprise content management (ECM) association." (AIIM website)
 * The AIIM community is made up of "users, suppliers and the channel" (AIIM website), and commercial vendors are reportedly a significant driving force.
 * Membership noted as an asset in oil and gas industry job postings for document control workers.


 * ARMA http://www.arma.org/
 * "ARMA International is a not-for-profit professional association and the authority on managing records and information – paper and electronic." "The association was established in 1955. Its approximately 11,000 members include records managers, archivists, corporate librarians, imaging specialists, legal professionals, IT managers, consultants, and educators, all of whom work in a wide variety of industries, including government, legal, healthcare, financial services, and petroleum in the United States, Canada, and 30-plus other countries." (ARMA website)
 * The ARMA community is reportedly made up primarily of user members.
 * Membership noted as an asset in oil and gas industry job postings for document control workers.