| # |
| 3D printing |
Additive manufacturing
techniques designed to create physical objects by printing or curing layers
of material sequentially using three-dimensional digital models. |
| A |
| A/B testing |
An approach that uses two different, but only slightly
different, versions of a product to test a hypothesis. Users are randomly
routed to alternative A or alternative B, and their experiences are measured.
The alternative with the better outcome is retained and the other is retired,
and the process continues on to the next hypothesis. |
| Account-based marketing |
A strategy through which marketing and sales jointly
obsess over how to pursue, establish, and grow long-term, highly engaged
revenue relationships with specific customer accounts. |
| Actionable intelligence |
Intelligence that
is accurate, aligned with intelligence requirements, integrated,
predictive, relevant, tailored, and timely. |
| Adaptive brand marketing |
A flexible approach in which marketers respond quickly to
their environment to align consumer and brand goals and maximize return on
brand equity. |
| Adaptive enterprise |
Firms whose business continually flexes, evolves, and pivots in response to rapidly changing customer, competitive, and technology trends. |
| Adaptive intelligence |
Real-time, multidirectional sharing of data in order to
derive contextually appropriate, authoritative knowledge that helps maximize
business value. |
| Adaptive thinking |
Proactively and effectively choosing between and applying divergent and convergent thinking depending on which mode is best suited to the situation. |
| Additive manufacturing |
An industrial process that creates physical products that are digitally designed with software and fabricated by 3D-printing machines. Additive manufacturing methods create tooling, castings, and end-use parts from various materials, such as polymers, metals, and composites. |
| Advanced analytics |
Analytic techniques and technologies that apply
statistical and/or machine learning algorithms that allow firms to discover,
evaluate, and optimize models that reveal and/or predict new insights. |
| Advanced attribution |
The practice of measuring the correct partial value of
each interactive ad that drove a desired outcome. |
| Advocate marketing |
The use of marketing strategy, budget, and resources to
encourage customers, employees, or partners to do something on behalf of your
company with or without the expectation of mutual benefit. |
| Agencies that support marketing |
Agency and service providers that help marketers understand their customers, build a brand strategy, and execute the brand experience. |
| Age of the customer |
A 20-year business cycle in which the most successful
enterprises will reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve
increasingly powerful customers. |
| Agile business
intelligence |
A combination of processes, methodologies, organizational
structure, tools, and technologies that enable strategic, tactical, and
operational decision-makers to be more flexible and more responsive to the
fast pace of customer, business, and regulatory changes. |
| Agile CMS |
A solution for collaboratively curating, creating, and delivering content across channels and campaigns via iterative development and deployment processes. |
| Agile co-creation |
Agile co-creation occurs when a software development services provider collaborates with its client, pooling domain knowledge and technical skills, to build a software application using agile methods. Agile co-creation utilizes funding models, techniques, and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as minimally viable product (MVP), agile sprints, and end user adoption that encourage experimentation and continual product improvement. |
| Agile commerce |
An approach to commerce that enables businesses to
optimize their people, processes, and technology to serve customers across
all touchpoints. |
| Agile governance |
Structures and processes that allow an enterprise to
diffuse decision-making throughout the organization, with just enough
oversight and coordination to ensure that business priorities and concerns
are met. |
| Agile O2O |
Technology-based systems, processes, and skills that help
retail firms transform their business and respond rapidly to market dynamics
by putting their traditional offline businesses online and by creating a
consistent user experience across multiple channels and ecosystems. |
| Agile workforce enablement |
A way to transform employee engagement and enable work
style flexibility using a deeper understanding of workforce experiences built
on virtual and cloud technology and combined with updated processes and
enhanced self-service. |
| AI-based text analytics |
Machine-learning- and rules-based analytics technology that mines semistructured and unstructured text data sources and extracts structured information (such as keywords, concepts, entities, topics, sentiment, emotion, and intent) to analyze the findings for correlations, trends, outliers, patterns, and anomalies. |
| AI chips |
Integrated circuits that are specifically designed to maximize the performance of one or more AI workloads including data preparation and analysis, model training, and model inferencing. |
| AI consultancies |
AI consultancies are service provider firms that bring a holistic approach across people, process, technology, and data science to help enterprises transform with AI-driven systems and experiences for competitive advantage. |
| AI for personalization |
The practice of applying machine learning to customer data to frame, guide, extend, and enhance customer interactions. |
| AI infrastructure |
Integrated circuits, computer systems, and cloud services specifically designed to maximize the performance of AI workloads, including data preparation and analysis, model training, and model inferencing. |
| AIOps |
Software that applies AI/ML or other advanced analytics to business and operations data to make correlations and provide prescriptive and predictive answers in real time. These insights produce real-time business performance KPIs, allow teams to resolve incidents faster, and help avoid incidents altogether. |
| Algorithm |
A set of rules and operations optimized for a specific outcome. |
| Always addressable
customer |
A person who owns and personally uses at least three
connected devices, access the internet multiple times a day, and goes online
from multiple physical locations, at least one of which is "on the
go." |
| Always-on social marketing processes |
Always-on social marketing processes are a steady state of activities that are unpredictable and customer or industry initiated. Examples include customer inquiries, brand mentions, cultural moments, industry breaking news, and crisis management. |
| Ambient data governance |
A strategy to infuse data governance into everyday data interaction and intelligently adapt data to personal intent. |
| Anonymization |
A method of de-identification that removes all personally identifiable information from a data set to the extent that makes the possibility of re-identification of the data negligible. |
| Antiphishing solutions |
Technology products that prevent phishing attacks by detecting malicious emails and increasing end user awareness of phishing techniques. |
| Anywhere-work strategy |
An anywhere-work strategy recognizes that employee engagement leads to better customer outcomes and works from there to provide technological, cultural, and leadership resources to support work from any location, enabling individual employees and entire teams to operate on an even playing field wherever they are. |
| AP eInvoicing |
The capturing of electronic invoice data; automating the
matching of an invoice with a purchase order, contract, and receipt; a
workflow to approve unmatched invoices; provides cash forecasting, discount
management, and financing; and the support of dynamic discounting. |
| API management solution |
A foundation for establishing, managing, and securing digital business relationships via direct applications connections within and between organizations and individuals, centering first on REST APIs but extending to encompass any means of digital connection.
|
| API strategy and delivery
service provider |
A consulting firm or systems integrator that, in addition
to delivering solutions that employ application programming interfaces
(APIs), is organized to assist technology user enterprises to design,
establish, and mature their organizational competency and strategy for APIs. |
| Application cloud testing |
Application testing capabilities and practices that
leverage the cloud's elastic scalability, universal accessibility, breadth of
services, and pay-as-you-go business model to manage and/or execute
functional and nonfunctional testing of applications wherever they are built
or run. |
| Application delivery
network |
A set of network infrastructures that, when deployed
together, provide application availability, security, visibility, and
acceleration. |
| Application elasticity |
The ability of an application to automatically adjust the
infrastructure resources it uses to accommodate varied workloads and
priorities while maintaining availability and performance. |
| Application interfaces |
Interfaces that enable integration between business
applications. They are available off the shelf but are frequently
custom-built in-house or by systems integrators. |
| Application modernization and migration services |
Services that facilitate the transformation of application assets to adapt, optimize, and migrate to or more readily integrate with more-modern digital software and cloud architectures or to retire them outright. Application modernization and migration services providers offer technical and professional services to perform application and system assessments, application migration, application modernization, development services for application replacement, and application retirement. |
| Application platform |
An integrated package of infrastructure, programming language(s), frameworks, tools, and programming models to structure and simplify the business code that developers write. |
| Application threat
modeling |
A methodology that analyzes the architecture and design of
an application to find potential design flaws that have security
consequences. |
| AR eInvoicing |
The presenting of electronic invoices to customers;
tracking the status of presented invoices; receives advance payment notices;
and the support of dynamic discounting. |
| Artificial intelligence |
The theory and capabilities that strive to mimic human
intelligence through experience and learning. |
| Artificial intelligence consultancies |
Service providers that have dedicated or concentrated expertise and offerings to deliver on artificial intelligence capabilities. |
| Asset-based consulting |
Services that include unique IP that the consultancy has built on software-as-a-service, cloud, and platform-based models. |
| Attack surface |
The sum of all externally addressable vulnerabilities
within an environment or system. |
| Attended RPA |
Automation that interacts in real time with humans who initiate and control robot tasks; often embeds functions within apps; and associates with front-office, agent-led activities. |
| Augmented BI platform |
Enterprise reporting and analytics software augmented with AI that provides descriptive and diagnostic analytics, data visualization and exploration, and dashboarding functionality as well as data integration and advanced (predictive and prescriptive) analytics based on statistical analysis and machine learning. These platforms support both graphical and conversational (cognitive) user interfaces. |
| Augmented intelligence |
The use of AI to improve a human's ability to do their job combining machine learning technologies for processing and analyzing data at scale; technologies for automating and orchestrating standard processes; and human input, decision-making, and action. |
| Augmented reality |
The virtual overlay of contextual digital information that
a computer generates on a physical-world object and that a user sees in the
display of a mobile device as its camera captures it in real time. |
| Authentication management solutions |
Authentication management solutions provide human and machine users with login, secure token service (STS) and validation, single sign-on (SSO), session management, identity federation, native two-factor authentication (2FA), and coarse-grained authorization to web and native mobile applications in a centralized policy management and auditing framework. |
| Automated life insurance underwriting |
A technology solution that is designed to perform life insurance applicant screening and classification functions traditionally completed by underwriters, thus seeking to reduce the manpower and time necessary to underwrite a life insurance application while employing data and advanced technology capabilities to improve underwriting performance. |
| Automated machine learning |
Capabilities and platforms that partially or fully automate the machine learning model development lifecycle — especially feature engineering, feature selection, algorithm selection, model training, hyperparameter tuning, and model validation — but also extend to aspects of data discovery, extract-transform-load, data prep, model deployment, model monitoring, and automated model retraining, as well as the automatic generation of visualizations and text explanations. |
| Autonomous enterprise |
An organization that combines emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning (ML), RPA, internet of things, and edge computing to deliver self-aware, self-correcting, self-directed, compelling customer experiences, including timely availability and fitness for purpose. |
| Autonomous finance |
Algorithm-driven services that make financial decisions or take action on a customer's behalf. |
| Azure services providers |
Suppliers that offer services for Microsoft Azure across a spectrum of advisory and strategy, migration, cloud-native development, and operations. Suppliers may offer services for Microsoft Azure only or as a set of services encompassing multiple public clouds and other platforms. |
| B |
| B2B commerce suite |
A suite of integrated applications or microservices designed to digitize the buying and selling of products and services, with a focus on the ability to manage the data, presentation, and processing of products, orders, and the experience of buyers throughout the discovery, purchase, and fulfillment phases. |
| B2B digital ecosystem |
A network of suppliers, distributors, and business
customers that is based on a distributed, adaptive, and open platform, which
has properties of self-organization, scalability, and sustainability, and
that collaborates to meet rising customer needs, drive innovation, and
explore new business models. |
| B2B e-commerce |
The sale of B2B products by manufacturers directly to
businesses and by wholesalers and distributors indirectly to businesses. |
| B2B marketing agencies |
A select class of service providers that strategize, plan, create, and manage marketing activities on behalf of clients to help increase the overall exposure of the company and its products, generate demand for offerings, enable sellers and partners, and deepen business relationships with target audiences and current accounts.
|
| B2B marketing automation |
Tools and processes that help generate new business
opportunities, improve potential buyers' propensity to purchase, manage
customer loyalty, and increase alignment between marketing activity and
revenue. |
| B2B marketing data providers |
Solutions that offer data, insights, and data management services to optimize marketing and sales efficiency and effectiveness. |
| B2B marketing performance
management |
A B2B marketing discipline, supported by tools and
processes, that increases marketing's value to the organization by governing
the goal setting, monitoring, and continuous optimization of marketing's
contribution to revenue and other priority business goals. |
| B2B pricing solutions |
Software that helps manufacturers to maximize their realized prices, net of volume discounts, price protection agreements, quotations, joint marketing funds, and retrospective discounts. |
| B2C commerce suites |
Integrated applications or microservices designed to digitize the buying and selling of products and services, with a focus on their ability to manage the data, presentation, and processing of products and orders and the experience of consumers throughout the discovery, purchase, and fulfillment process. |
| B2C EBPP |
A platform that manages the digital delivery of B2C bills and billing-related communications and facilitates electronic bill payment services. |
| Banking platform |
A core banking application along with most, if not all, of the relevant functions for a bank's business, as well as a comprehensive multichannel functionality. |
| Bare-metal cloud services |
IaaS offerings that deliver dedicated physical
infrastructure that does not include virtualization and is provisioned via
the same type of cloud interface with the common characteristics of virtual
machine- (VM)-based cloud offerings, including on-demand access, unlimited
scale, and detailed resource accounting. |
| Behavioral biometrics |
Technologies that pattern users' device interactions so
that organizations can continuously authenticate and augment verification of
identities across digital channels. |
| Behavioral targeting |
The process of serving tailored content to website
visitors based on their characteristics, behavior, and interaction history. |
| BI governance |
A combination of policies, processes, and technologies
that allows business and technology pros to collaborate, manage, monitor, and
adjust BI usage to maximize BI value and effectiveness. BI governance is a
key component of data governance; the findings and outcomes of BI governance
feed into data governance processes and may affect data governance policies. |
| BICoE |
A permanent, cross-functional, virtual or physical
organizational structure, loosely coupled for flexibility and agility, that
is responsible for the governance and processes necessary to deliver or
facilitate the delivery of successful BI solutions; it's also an
institutional steward of, protector of, and forum for BI best practices. |
| Big data |
The practices and technology that close the gap between
the data available and the ability to turn that data into business insight. |
| Big data fabric |
Bringing together disparate big data sources
automatically, intelligently, and securely, and processing them in a big data
platform technology, such as Hadoop and Apache Spark, to deliver a unified,
trusted, and comprehensive view of customer and business data. |
| Big data integration |
The integration of data from disparate big data sources
including Hadoop, NoSQL, internet of things (IoT), cloud, data warehouses,
files, and databases, whether on-premises or in the cloud, structured or
unstructured, to support big data analytics, predictive analytics, and other
workload patterns. |
| Big data NoSQL |
A nonrelational database management system that provides storage, processing, and accessing of any type of data and which supports a horizontal, scale-out architecture based on a schemaless and flexible data model. |
| Big data search and
knowledge discovery solutions |
Tools and technologies that support the self-service
extraction of information and new insights from large repositories of
unstructured and structured data that resides in multiple sources, such as
file systems, databases, streams, APIs, other platforms, and applications. |
| Big data warehouse |
A specialized, cohesive set of data repositories and
platforms that supports a broad variety of analytics running on-premises, in
the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. BDW leverages traditional and new big
data technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, columnar and row-based data
warehouses, ETL and streaming, and elastic in-memory and storage frameworks. |
| BISC |
A permanent, cross-functional, virtual, or physical
organizational structure, loosely coupled for flexibility and agility,
responsible for the governance and processes necessary to deliver or
facilitate the delivery of successful BI solutions, as well as an
institutional steward of, protector of, and forum for BI best practices. |
| Blockchain |
A concept consisting of the methods, technologies, and
tool sets to support a distributed, tamper-evident, and reliable way to
ensure transaction integrity, irrefutability, and non-repudiation.
Blockchains are write-once, append-only data stores that include validation,
consensus, storage, replication, and security for transactions or other
records. |
| BPM governance |
A formal decision-making process that establishes the
structure of the BPM program and projects in terms of lines of
responsibility, authority, and communication. It defines the policies,
standards, measurements, empowerment, and feedback mechanisms that enable the
program's execution. |
| Brand experience |
The sum of all the impressions, beliefs, and expectations
that a customer has of a brand, including direct interactions, messaging, and
peer conversation. |
| Brand resilience |
The ability of the brand experience to live up to and
remain consistent with the brand promise, maintaining its integrity even in
the face of damaging interactions, events, or circumstances. |
| Branded content |
Content that a brand develops or curates to add consumer
value. Often taking the form of entertainment or education, branded content
is designed to build brand consideration and affinity, not to sell a product
or service. |
| Browser isolation
technology |
A capability that combines an email isolation system and
virtual browser technology; it can easily integrate with an existing
infrastructure and provides a way to isolate and control a user's
interactions on the open internet. The service or capability must require no
software or plug-ins on the endpoint and be compatible with any device, OS,
browser, and mail client. |
| BT service catalog |
A subset of the BT service portfolio, representing all
live services managed on behalf of the business. |
| Bug bounty programs |
An invitation to vetted security researchers — who are paid by results — to discover and report security flaws within a set scope. Program owners often provide payment processing, bug verification, and recruitment and selection of top security researchers. |
| Business agility |
The transition to a digital business, which allows an
enterprise to embrace market, organizational, and operational changes as a
matter of routine. |
| Business architecture |
An organized and repeatable approach to describing and
analyzing an organization's business and operating models to support a wide
variety of organizational change purposes, from cost reduction and
restructuring to process change and transformation. |
| Business capability
implementation |
An integrated, operational, measurable combination of
people, process, technology, and physical and digital resources that fulfill
the definition of a business capability (a complete running part of a
business). |
| Business change management |
The process, tools, and techniques to manage the people
side of change to achieve a required business outcome. |
| Business continuity management software |
Tools used to create, maintain, test, communicate, and execute more structured, current, collaborative, and actionable business continuity plans. |
| Business designer |
A services firm that helps companies apply expert design
practices to creating strategies and business models and to overhauling
digital ecosystems from end to end. |
| Business development |
The identification and development of new business
opportunities involving new markets, products, services, and business models.
The business development function can involve market research, ideation,
customer validation, portfolio optimization, product or service development,
and financial and resource management, including partnerships. |
| Business drivers |
The evolving customer, competitor, and technology trends
that collectively act as an environmental force, driving your company to
evaluate and hone its CRM strategy and practices. |
| Business intelligence |
A set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and
technologies — supported by organizational structures, roles, and
responsibilities — that transform raw data into meaningful and useful
information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and
operational insights and decision-making that contribute to improving overall
enterprise performance. |
| Business networks |
Networks that enable business partners to collaborate and
share data in real time on a single cloud platform based on trust
relationship models rather than by mapping and exchanging B2B data. |
| Business process
management |
A discipline focused on continuous improvement and
transformation of end-to-end cross-functional business processes. |
| Business process
outsourcing |
Using a third-party supplier to perform a business
function or part of a function. Examples of business processes commonly
outsourced include aspects of human resources (e.g., employee benefits
administration), finance (e.g., accounts receivable), and call center (e.g.,
inbound customer support). |
| Business resiliency |
The ability of an organization to deliver on its vision and brand promise, no matter the crisis. |
| Business satisfaction |
The extent to which business customers believe a service
meets their expectations. |
| Business service
management |
The concept of dynamically linking business-focused IT
services to the underlying IT infrastructure. |
| Business technology |
Technology, systems, and processes to win, serve, and
retain customers. |
| Business technology
resiliency |
The ability of business technology to absorb the impact of
an unexpected occurrence and not disrupt business operations. |
| Businesswide networking fabrics |
A combination of network components interweaving layer 1 through layer 7 network hardware, software, and services to interconnect users, data, and applications throughout the entire business, based on business policies through a networking orchestration system.
|
| C |
| C2M model |
A customer-obsessed manufacturing business model that directly connects end customers and manufacturers using a future-fit technology strategy to enable manufacturing adaptability, creativity, and resilience. |
| Campaign social marketing processes |
Campaign social marketing processes are time-bound efforts that are planned and brand initiated. Examples include integrated branding efforts, regularly scheduled social series, new product launches, contests/promotions, holiday/seasonal messaging, and live events. |
| Canonical information
model |
A model of the semantics and structure of information that
adheres to a set of rules agreed upon within a defined context for
communicating among a set of applications or parties. |
| Carbon and energy
management software |
Software that helps executive/business management monitor,
analyze, and manage enterprise carbon emissions and energy consumption;
facility/ops management monitor, analyze, and manage the carbon emissions and
energy consumption of facilities; and IT management monitor, analyze, and
manage the carbon emissions and energy consumption of ICT assets. |
| Case management |
A highly structured, collaborative, dynamic, and
information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires
incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling a
case. |
| Change management |
The process, tools, coordination, and planning to manage
the people side of change through sentiment awareness and change-management
skills that together achieve a required state of business agility. |
| Channel incentives and program management |
Channel incentives drive behavior; whether establishing new behaviors, suppressing old ones, or repositioning partners for a new opportunity. Incentives can also mask deficiencies in business value propositions. Channel incentives and program management solutions automate and scale channel incentives across a broad set of partners. |
| Channel software |
Technologies that enable channel organizations to plan with, find, recruit, onboard, develop, enable, incent, co-sell with, comarket with, manage, measure, and report on partners. |
| Chatbots for IT operations solutions |
Chatbots and virtual agents deliver digital experiences through virtual personas and automation accessed through conversational interfaces. Chatbots for IT operations solutions are designed to assist in or facilitate the execution of IT operations and service delivery activities with targeted functionality, such as domain-specific intent models and templated workflows. |
| ChatOps |
The extension of a chat platform to enable collaboration
and decision-making within one virtual environment. ChatOps merges human
conversation with automation through custom configurations, integrations, and
operational bots. |
| CISO |
The role responsible for the creation, implementation, and
oversight of strategies and programs designed to limit information risk
across the entire extended enterprise to a level tolerable to the business. |
| Clienteling |
The use of data about an individual customer's buying
habits and preferences during in-store interactions, typically in high-end or
luxury retail stores. |
| Client onboarding |
A firm's activities when a client signs up for a new
product or enrolls for a new service; these drive the product/service
engagement and future cross-selling and retention goals. |
| Cloud-based learning technology platforms |
Platforms that enable skills development in a digital environment. |
| Cloud bursting |
The dynamic reallocation of workloads from on-premises
environments to cloud providers and vice versa. Workloads can represent
technical infrastructure or end-to-end business processes. |
| Cloud computing |
A standardized technology delivery capability (services,
software, or infrastructure) delivered via internet-standard technologies in
a pay-per-use, self-service way. |
| Cloud contact center providers |
Vendors that provide a cloud-based subscription service for contact center software suites for omnichannel routing, reporting, IVR, and workforce optimization. A number of deployment options are available, ranging from dedicated infrastructure and software to multitenant contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions. |
| Cloud continuous integration tools |
Cloud-native CI tools are continuous integration tools designed and built for operating in the public cloud using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for delivering their capability. They provide the execution and orchestration of build automation, unit tests, static code analysis, functional and nonfunctional automated testing, artifact repositories, and delivery to downstream test environments. |
| Cloud cost management and optimization |
A solution that delivers cost visibility and provides a means to optimize cloud spend. |
| Cloud data lake |
A data repository that stores, processes, transforms, secures, and provides access to any kind of data, including structured, semistructured, and unstructured, in raw and curated formats to support data discovery, data preparation, search, data security, data science, insights, and analytics requirements. |
| Cloud data pipeline |
Ingesting, processing, and transforming high-velocity data for integration flows, data movement, and persistence in a self-service and automated manner. |
| Cloud data warehouse |
An on-demand, secure, and scalable self-service data warehouse that automates the provisioning, administration, tuning, backup, and recovery to accelerate analytics and actionable insights while minimizing administration requirements.
|
| Cloud desktop |
A standardized service offering that deploys complete virtual desktop and/or desktop applications and is delivered remotely, i.e., via hyperscale cloud or a managed service provider. It's freely accessible by IT administrators and end users through a self-service interface, employs pay-per-use billing, and provides desktops and/or applications on demand. |
| Cloud governance |
The ability to provide strategic direction, track performance, allocate resources, and modify services to ensure meeting organizational objectives without breaching the parameters of risk tolerance or compliance obligations.
|
| Cloud HARK platforms |
Distributed computing software and services that are rooted in open source Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark to ingest, store, process, manage, and analyze data to generate insights that drive business outcomes. |
| Cloud identity governance |
A collection of technologies and control processes to track performance, allocate resources, and modify cloud services in a robust identity context. CIG's goals include controlling human and non-human identity and resource access to cloud resources to reduce security risk, improve administration efficiencies, and achieve compliance. |
| Cloud security gateways |
Solutions that protect against data loss and detect and intercept malware in cloud data. They also provide protection against anomalous user activity with cloud data and provide incident response and analytics using network traffic interception, firewall log ingestion, and cloud application API connections. |
| Cloud service provider |
Any third-party technology vendor that offers its services
in compliance with the NIST definition of cloud computing. |
| Cognitive moment |
An instance where a system offers people human-like
(cognitive) assistance based on their unique context and needs. |
| Cognitive operations |
Software that applies advanced analytics and machine
learning to analyze historical IT operations data and make predictions that
expedite management, speed problem resolution, prevent developing problems,
and attach business significance to those problems resolved or prevented. |
| Cognitive search |
Next-generation search engine software that employs AI technologies such as machine learning (ML) to ingest, understand, and organize information from multiple disparate data sources to enable humans to find content, answers, insights and/or explore a large corpus of information. |
| Cognitive search and
knowledge discovery |
The new generation of enterprise search solutions that
employ AI technologies, such as natural language processing and machine
learning, to ingest, understand, organize, and query digital content from
multiple data sources. |
| Cognitive tipping point |
A CTP is the inflection point at which cognitive
technology transforms a given segment of work by interacting with humans
naturally and by turning data into insights and action. |
| Collaboration work management (CWM) tools |
Software tools that support the confluence of project and process work by allowing users to create personal and team workspaces; invite other users, internal and external to the organization, to collaborate on digital artifacts; identify workload requirements and capacity; and allocate activities to other users to deliver on work items and then track progress.
|
| Collaborative economy |
A business environment that leverages nonhierarchical,
multiplatform collaboration tools to efficiently transfer information and
opinions among individuals via peer-to-peer communication to create and
sustain competitive advantage. |
| Commerce service providers |
Providers with the expertise, assets, and alliances to help B2C and B2B companies craft commerce strategies and implement commerce experiences and operations. |
| Commercial drone |
An unmanned aerial system, controlled remotely by a human operator or autonomously by onboard computers, that is designed to fulfill commercial tasks in indoor and outdoor environments for enterprises, organizations, and governments by performing functions such as mapping, surveying, product delivery, surveillance, and machine and infrastructure inspection. |
| Competitive intelligence |
A systematic and ongoing process for gathering information
to derive actionable insights about competitors, the competitive environment,
and trends in order to further the organization's business goals. |
| Complex event processing |
CEP automates the process of correlating events to
identify patterns that may represent threats or opportunities and
orchestrating actions to respond to them. |
| Computational propaganda |
Concerted activity with financial, geopolitical, or other explicit motives to sow discord and distribute biased or misleading information at massive scale through the use of powerful computing resources, specialized AI and machine learning, and access to distributed online forums and social networks (and the resulting psychographic data). |
| Computer vision |
Tools and technology to analyze images and video in order to understand and interpret the objects and object features within the images and video. |
| Connected things |
Manufactured products with integrated or attached electronic computing and communications that enable sending data and/or receiving commands. Most include sensors to record conditions and send sensor readings or analyses to a remote software program. Most will be able to receive software updates. Some include mechanical actuators that can be triggered by local or remote software command to change a physical-world state. |
| Connected world |
Technologies that enable objects and infrastructure to
interact with monitoring, analytics, and control systems over internet-style
networks. |
| Consumer data marketing services |
Agencies and service providers that help marketers maximize the value of first-party customer data assets across all their marketing channels and programs. |
| Container security |
Products that reduce the vulnerabilities containers may introduce by implementing automatic security checks and processes throughout the development lifecycle. |
| Content analytics |
The process of extracting and analyzing information
patterns in unstructured collections to improve the management of content and
document-centric processes. |
| Content governance |
The combination of rules, processes, guidance, and teams
that together ensure that content created and published across a business
supports its strategic goals. In the case of marketing, these goals ladder up
to optimal brand and customer experiences. |
| Content intelligence |
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to
understand and capture the qualities inherent in any content — its emotional
appeal, subject matter, style, tone, or sentiment, for example. |
| Content marketing |
A marketing strategy where brands create interest,
relevance, and relationships with customers by producing, curating, and
sharing content that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible
value. |
| Content marketing
platforms |
Solutions that help marketing teams collaborate on a
content strategy; orchestrate the numerous, concurrent streams of activity by
content creators, curators, and distributors inside and outside the company;
and optimize downstream cross-channel distribution to key audiences. |
| Content platform |
A software platform architected specifically for the design, development, and delivery of document-, content-, or process-rich applications. Content platforms enable the decoupling of repository, application, and user interface layers, and reveal services and APIs for application creation and integration. |
| Content production agencies |
Service providers that specialize in the efficient, large-scale, on-brand production of marketing content and assets for brands, based on third-party creative direction or leadership (usually from either a creative agency or the brand itself). |
| Content services |
Procedures related to accessing content and modifying
materials (e.g., check in, check out, permissions, security). |
| Content strategy |
The discipline of planning, creating, delivering, and governing content to serve organizational goals. |
| Contextual marketing
engine |
A brand-specific platform that exploits customer context
to deliver utility and guide the customer to the next best interaction. |
| Contextual privacy |
A business practice in which the collection and use of
personal data is consensual, within a mutually agreed upon context, for a
mutually agreed upon purpose. |
| Contingent labor |
The term for employing temporary workers to fill specific
requirements on a short-term or long-term basis; also called staff
augmentation. |
| Continuous automation and testing services |
People, processes, and technology services to deliver quality at speed by coaching, consulting, and conducting all agile development and DevOps testing activities continuously, automatically, and smartly. CAT services are provisioned to clients in parallel, and in an integrated fashion, with ideating, planning, building, integrating, delivering, and deploying features into production. |
| Continuous business
services |
A thin layer of process and technology that binds business
capabilities from multiple organizations to moments in a customer journey
through any and all channels and continuously creates and captures specific
customer value through ongoing management and updates. |
| Continuous delivery and release automation
|
Applications that automate software delivery through modeling applications, infrastructure, middleware, and their supporting installation processes and dependencies. The resulting release packages then transition across defined digital pipelines, spanning the value stream from source code through build, test, package, and deployment into production.
|
| Continuous deployment |
The technical capabilities to continuously deploy
infrastructure, software, and process changes in support of digital business
applications or services to customers. |
| Continuous functional test automation suites |
Tools that offer multiple test automation choices, which at their core test the functionality of applications across various channels such as web, desktop, and mobile in an automated way, significantly reducing manual intervention and enabling fast left-shifting continuous testing. These tools increasingly offer multiple but integrated testing type experiences for multiple testing personas. |
| Continuous integration tools |
Tools that automate the practice of frequently building, testing, and merging source code into a common branch of source code within a version control system. |
| Continuous optimization |
A data-, analytics-, and insights-driven approach that seeks to leverage every customer interaction to evolve the understanding of the customer in order to adapt and optimize customer experiences. |
| Continuous software delivery |
A state where AD&D teams deliver minimum viable products (MVPs) by reducing the time, risk, and expense of software delivery with extensive visibility and traceability. |
| Continuous testing |
The people, processes, and technology to deliver quality
at speed and minimize business risk by conducting all agile testing
activities continuously in parallel to and in an integrated fashion with
ideating/planning, building, integrating, delivering, and deploying features
into production. Testing also happens post-production by leveraging the
DevOps feedback loop. |
| Continuous value delivery |
Removing friction from the value delivery process by
bringing together the people responsible for designing and delivering a
product or service and giving them ownership of the outcomes, while using
agile and DevOps delivery models to continuously refine and improve the
customer experience. |
| Contract lifecycle
management |
Software solutions that help firms create and negotiate
contracts, manage individual contract compliance, and understand the risks,
obligations, and entitlements in your contract portfolio. |
| Contract lifecycle management products |
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) products provide a contract repository for all finished contracts; a library of contract terms and conditions that can be custom assembled into new contracts; contract creation templates, wizards, and guides; and reports and analysis. |
| Converged infrastructure |
An approach to technology infrastructure that packages
server, storage, and network functions into a modular unit and adds a
software layer to discover, pool, and reconfigure assets. |
| Convergent designer |
A services firm that helps companies apply expert design
practices to products, services, and spaces. |
| Conversational interface |
An interface that lets a person use natural language to interact with a technology that adjusts its responses based on previous interactions and contextual knowledge. |
| Conversational marketing |
The ability for a brand to scale interactive and personalized communications and relationships with its customers in a persistent, dynamic dialogue — on time, in context, and across channels. |
| Cord-cutters |
Used in Europe and the US to define those who have chosen
to forgo their landlines. |
| Core banking applications |
An (important) subset of a banking platform that includes
deposits, credit, loans, product configurators, plus related basic client
data. |
| Corporate culture |
The environment in which employees think about, do, and manage their work. This includes the company's mission, business values and ethics, the physical work environment, and the approach to technology infrastructure. |
| Corporate social responsibility |
A business' commitment to operate in a manner that meets or exceeds the ethical, legal, and commercial expectations of the public. |
| Corporate values |
The social, moral, religious, political, or ethical beliefs shared by people in and around the organization. |
| cPEST analysis |
A modification of traditional PEST analysis that looks at
the impact of political, economic, social, and technology changes on a firm's
current and potential customers. |
| CPQ solutions |
CPQ solutions are integrated suites of software
applications that enhance sales productivity across channels by automating or
guiding the processes around product configuration, pricing, and quoting in
order to deliver the right products to the right customers at the right
prices. |
| Creative adtech |
Technology that helps B2C marketers automate the process of developing, testing, optimizing, and personalizing digital advertising creative. |
| Crisis communication and mass notification solutions |
Vendors that deliver alert and critical messages via a variety of communication modes at scale and facilitate incident response to a range of critical events such as extreme weather, active shooter scenarios, business technology outages, etc. Offerings include predefined templates and workflows, facilitate bidirectional communication, and integrate other data such as third-party intelligence, physical access data, IP addresses, and location data to increase situational awareness of the event itself and affected individuals. |
| CRM strategy |
The approach that the organization will take to execute the business process and technologies that support the key activities of targeting, acquiring, retaining, understanding, and collaborating with customers. |
| CRM technology roadmap |
A plan that matches short-term and long-term customer relationship management goals with specific technology solutions to help meet those goals. |
| Cross-channel attribution |
The practice of using advanced statistical approaches to
allocate proportional credit to marketing communications and media activity
across all channels, which ultimately leads to the desired customer action. |
| Cross-channel banking
platform |
A front-end solution that enables interactions and
transactions via the web and other channels; works with existing back-end
solutions like core banking to deliver functionality; and potentially offers
front-end-specific capabilities like account aggregation, content management,
or product overviews and infrastructure for purposes like security and
integration. |
| Cross-channel behavior |
When a customer or prospect moves from one touchpoint to
another to complete their objective. |
| Cross-channel campaign management |
Enterprise marketing technology that supports customer data management, analytics, segmentation, and workflow tools for designing, executing, and measuring campaigns for digital and offline channels. |
| Cross-Channel Review |
An evaluation based on a scenario methodology to uncover
flaws that prevent users from accomplishing goals when their paths take them
across multiple channels. |
| Cross-touchpoint behavior |
Any instance in which a customer or prospect moves from
one touchpoint to another when completing an objective. |
| CRUD |
A current-state analysis exercise that inventories the
systems, applications, and business processes that can create, read, update,
and delete critical enterprise data and attributes. It's used to identify the
processes and data access points that are affecting data quality or allowing
improper usage of the data without suitable validation and governance. |
| Culture |
A set of shared values and beliefs that drive behavior. |
| Culture work |
Creating a system of shared values and behaviors that
focus employees on delivering great customer experiences. |
| Customer-activated
enterprise |
An organization that uses technology and data to connect
customers and employees in ways that inform every employee, every moment, on
every decision to provide deeper and more competent customer engagement. |
| Customer advocacy |
The perception on the part of customers that a firm does
what's best for them, not just what's best for the firm's own bottom line. |
| Customer analytics technologies |
The tools, solutions, and platforms companies use to transform data into customer-focused actions that win, serve, and retain customers. |
| Customer-centric banking
platform |
A banking platform with a strong focus on customer
experience, channels, social media, and analytics, as well as real-time
customer-facing functionality and information provisioning. |
| Customer-centric culture |
A system of shared values and behaviors that focus
employees on delivering great customer experiences. |
| Customer-centric DNA |
A strong, shared set of beliefs that guides how customers
are treated. |
| Customer collaboration |
A reciprocal exchange of valuable information and insights
between a vendor and its client stakeholders. |
| Customer communications management |
Software used to compose, format, personalize, and distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications and improve the customer experience. CCM software supports content types such as letterhead, invoices, correspondence, marketing materials, policies, statements, and welcome kits. |
| Customer data management |
The people, processes, technologies, and architectures
that collect, analyze, organize, and share customer data to support business
functions including R&D, operations, marketing, sales, and customer
experience. |
| Customer data onboarding |
The process of making offline, known customer data
available as online, anonymous audience segments for marketing engagement. |
| Customer data platform |
A CDP centralizes customer data from multiple sources and makes it available to systems of insight and engagement. |
| Customer decision
management |
An enterprise application that enables firms to guide
customers to relevant goals, using the customers' contexts and interaction
histories as well as adaptive models, business rules, and priorities to
select content and actions at customer-facing touchpoints. |
| Customer engagement marketing |
Technologies for identifying, organizing, and engaging existing customers to advocate, publish content, activate media, or influence buyers on behalf of your company in exchange for value. |
| Customer engagement
technology gap |
The gap between the use of business technology to win,
serve, and retain customers and what companies deploy today. |
| Customer experience (CX) |
Customers’ perceptions of their interactions with a company. |
| Customer experience
ecosystem |
The web of relations among all aspects of a company —
including its customers, employees, partners, and operating environment —
that determine the quality of the customer experience. |
| Customer experience
ecosystem maps |
A visual representation of the interactions among a
company, its partners, and its operating environment that produce the
customer experience. |
| Customer experience
innovation |
The creation of new customer experiences that drive
differentiation and long-term value. |
| Customer experience
maturity |
The extent to which an organization routinely performs the
practices required to design, implement, and manage customer experience in a
disciplined way. |
| Customer experience
strategy |
A plan that guides the activities and resource allocation
needed to deliver an experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations. |
| Customer feedback
management |
Software and processes that support a company's
voice-of-the-customer program by helping it solicit feedback from key
customers across channels; centrally collect solicited/unsolicited feedback;
analyze structured/unstructured feedback; distribute insights across the
organization; close the loop with customers; act on the insights; and monitor
progress continuously. |
| Customer identity and access management |
CIAM is a collection of tools and processes that provide: 1) security (registration, authentication, authorization, and self-service) core functionality identity and access management and 2) integration and workflows with marketing management, portals, CRM, master data management (MDM), business intelligence (BI), security analytics (SA), and other nonsecurity solutions for managing customers across all channels, including web, mobile app, phone, kiosk, mail, and in person. |
| Customer insights method |
An analytics or research-based method that uses quantitative or qualitative customer data to discover and explore or describe and predict customer behavior. Customer insights methods support business decisions that drive loyalty and retention, improve personalization, enhance customer experiences, increase revenue, or reduce costs. |
| Customer journey analytics |
An analytics practice that combines quantitative and
qualitative data to analyze customer behaviors and motivations across
touchpoints and over time to optimize customer interactions and predict
future behavior. |
| Customer journey map |
A document that illustrates customers' processes, needs,
and perceptions throughout their relationships with a company. |
| Customer lifecycle |
The enterprise's view of the phases a customer passes
through in the course of an ongoing relationship with a company. |
| Customer lifetime value |
A customer's potential monetary worth through the course
of his or her relationship with a business. |
| Customer loyalty |
A win-win relationship in which engaged consumers reward
brands with increased wallet share and word-of-mouth recommendations. |
| Customer-obsessed
enterprise |
A customer-obsessed enterprise focuses its strategy and
its budget on the technologies, systems, and processes that win, serve, and
retain customers. |
| Customer-obsessed government organization |
A customer-obsessed government organization uses its knowledge of and engagement with customers to drive its leadership, strategy, and operations in ways that ensure mission success. |
| Customer relationship
management |
The business processes and supporting technologies that
support targeting, acquiring, retaining, understanding, and collaborating
with customers. |
| Customer research |
Understanding your customers in depth and communicating that understanding to employees and partners (also known as user research, design research, or customer understanding research). |
| Customer service
governance policies and processes |
A formal decision-making process that establishes the
framework of the customer service projects and program in terms of lines of
responsibility, authority, and communication and defines the policies,
standards, measurements, empowerment, and feedback mechanisms that enable the
program's execution. |
| Customer success programs |
The services and roles provided by a software-as-a-service
(SaaS) vendor to help customers get fast business value out of the SaaS
solution and continuously improve to achieve long-term return on investment
(ROI). |
| CX and design agencies |
Service providers that help customer experience, employee experience, and user experience professionals build CX/EX strategy, organizational models, and frameworks and apply human-centered design to improve experiences and outcomes. |
| CX beacon metric |
The CX metric that serves as an organization's key performance indicator for CX success. |
| CX competency |
A domain of expertise needed for delivering the intended experiences to customers. |
| CX ecosystem |
The web of relations among all aspects of a company — including its customers, employees, partners, and operating environment — that determine the quality of CX. |
| CX ecosystem map |
A visual representation of the interactions among a
company, its partners, and its operating environment that produce the
customer experience. |
| CX management (CXM) |
Applying all the CX competencies in alignment with the company’s CX vision by performing the CX activities each one requires. |
| CX management maturity (CXMM) |
Your company’s degree of expertise at CX management, especially in terms of discipline: rigor, cadence, coordination, and accountability. |
| CX measurement |
Quantifying the quality of experiences and their link to your organization’s overall metrics. |
| CX prioritization |
Focusing on what’s most important for your customers’ experience and your business’ success. |
| CX roadmap |
A sequence of projects with assignments to accountable individuals, to be completed over time for the purpose of attaining the degree of CX maturity required to achieve the broader goals of the business. |
| CX strategy |
A plan that guides the activities and resource allocation required to deliver intended experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations in accordance with the goals of the organization. |
| CX strategy consulting practice |
A consultancy that helps businesses develop a CX vision and strategy rooted in business strategy and customer needs and that helps establish the cultural, organizational, human capital, and analytical infrastructure needed to turn vision to reality. |
| CX vision |
A depiction of the overall experience an organization intends to deliver to customers that is rooted in the company’s brand and values. |
| Cybersecurity consulting services |
Services that help solve complex cybersecurity challenges by evaluating, developing, and improving all aspects of an enterprise security and risk program. Domains include setting cybersecurity strategy and vision, implementing security solutions, responding to threats and incidents, checking for compliance, and assessing the security health of systems. |
| Cybersecurity incident response providers |
Cybersecurity incident response providers deliver strong incident preparation and breach response services to enable their clients to successfully navigate the regulatory, legal, and reputational consequences of a cybersecurity incident. |
| D |
| Data analysis service |
Any service offering targeting the exploration, modeling,
or analysis of data in order to derive higher-value business insights from
the data. |
| Database performance
monitoring |
The detection, recording, and presenting of holistic data
and the generation of alerts regarding the performance of enterprise database
applications and their host server(s). These solutions are part of the
application performance management (APM) discipline. |
| Database as a service |
An on-demand, secure, scalable, and self-service database that automates the database provisioning and administration to support new and existing business applications and operational systems. |
| Data center colocation |
A fully outfitted and managed data center space, complete
with all of the necessary mechanical, electrical, security, and safety
equipment and personnel required to house and support the hardware for your
technology management functions. |
| Data center facilities |
The space, power, cooling, security, and safety equipment
required to support IT hardware. |
| Data certification |
The process that guarantees data meets expected standards
for quality, security, and regulatory compliance, supporting business
decision-making, business performance, and business process. |
| Data delivery service |
Any service offering targeting the data consumption
endpoint of the data value chain with the delivery of data insights to
business users for presentation or into business processes, e.g., for process
automation. |
| Data discovery |
The process of analyzing the type, quality, accessibility,
and location of data in all available data repositories. It's critical for
determining the current state of a data environment, especially when a recent
and accurate data dictionary doesn't exist. |
| Data economy |
The system that provides for the exchange of digitized
information for the purpose of creating insights and value. |
| Data governance 2.0 |
An agile approach to data governance focused on just
enough controls for managing risk, which enables broader and more insightful
use of data required by the evolving needs of an expanding business
ecosystem. |
| Data governance solutions |
A suite of software and services that help you create, manage, and assess the rules for data acquisition, access, and use, including data definitions, policies, quality, regulatory requirements, ethical considerations, use rights, privacy and security, and end-to-end lifecycles. Integrated tools enable collaboration and education across the organization. |
| Data governance
stewardship |
A combination of data governance policies and stewardship
management features that allows business and technical data stewards to
collaborate to establish, manage, govern, and assess the policies and rules
that maximize data's value and effectiveness. |
| Data governance tools |
Tools that provide capabilities to support the
administrative tasks and processes of data stewardship. These tools support
the creation of data policies, manage workflow, and provide monitoring and
measurement of policy compliance and data use. |
| Data literacy |
The ability to recognize, evaluate, work with, communicate, and apply data in the context of business priorities and outcomes. |
| Data loss prevention |
A capability that detects and prevents violations to
corporate policies regarding the use, storage, and transmission of sensitive
data. Its purpose is to enforce policies to prevent unwanted dissemination of
sensitive information. |
| Data management |
The processes, procedures, policies, technologies, and
architecture that manage data from definition to destruction, which includes
transformation, governance, quality, security, and availability throughout
its lifecycle. |
| Data management for analytics |
A specialized, cohesive set of data repositories and platforms that supports a broad variety of modern analytics running on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid cloud. It leverages traditional and new platforms such as object stores, data lakes, data warehouses, NoSQL DBMSes, and elastic memory and storage frameworks. It also uses AI and machine learning capabilities inside the platform to automate data management functions. |
| Data management platform |
A unified technology platform that intakes disparate first-, second-, and third-party data sets, provides normalization and segmentation on that data, and allows a user to push the resulting segmentation into live interactive channel environments. |
| Data management services |
Any service offering targeting the finding, collecting,
migration, or integration of data. This may also include the development of
infrastructure to support data management operations. |
| Data masking |
The process of obfuscating sensitive data in production and non-production environments to support data security and compliance requirements. |
| Data networks |
Data networks are a metadata, messaging, event, and policy-driven architecture that elastically scales storage, compute, and state to the most optimal point for insight and automation. |
| Data policy |
A business principle that indicates the specific rules and
constraints required of data. Data policies can take the form of operating
procedures, responsibility and accountability assignments, data standards,
and data models, as well as parameters for quality, temporality, and
security. |
| Data preparation solutions |
Technology that accelerates and democratizes enterprise data exploration and sourcing, blending, cleaning, and transformation of diverse data types for activation via data science and/or connections to BI/analytics, data management, and systems of insight, balancing speed and business user ease of use with manageability, scalability, and governance. |
| Data preparation tools |
Software that eases the burden of sourcing, shaping,
cleansing, and sharing diverse and messy data sets to accelerate data's
usefulness for analytics. |
| Data protection |
The mechanisms with which an organization enables
individuals to retain control of the personal data they willingly share,
where security provides policies, controls, protocols, and technologies
necessary to fulfill rules and obligations in accordance with privacy
regulations, industry standards, and the organization's ethics and social
responsibility. |
| Data resiliency |
The ability of data storage and retention technologies to
absorb the impact of any unexpected occurrence without any data loss and with
minimal impact perceived by customers. |
| Data security and privacy technology |
Technologies that directly touch the data itself and that help organizations: 1) understand where their data is located and identify what data is sensitive; 2) control data movement as well as introduce data-centric controls that protect the data no matter where it is; and 3) enable least privilege access and use. This still encompasses a wide range of technologies. |
| Data security platform |
A single platform or integrated suite of products that delivers a holistic approach to securing data, from understanding your data and what is sensitive, serving contextual or business insights about the data and its use, providing insight about risks and threats to the data, and implementing key capabilities to control and protect the data. |
| Data services |
Any service offering, from advisory and consulting
services to the building and management of solutions, aimed at the delivery,
analysis, management, or governance of data. |
| Data virtualization |
The integration and transformation of data in real time or near real time from disparate data sources in multicloud and hybrid cloud, to support business intelligence, reporting, analytics, and other workloads. |
| DDoS mitigation solutions |
Technologies and services that reduce the impact of DDoS attacks, ensuring availability of critical services and applications. DDoS mitigation solutions are delivered via appliances or technology deployed on a client's premises or by services delivered via a content delivery network (CDN), by a service provider or public cloud infrastructure, or as a combination of on-premises technology and services. |
| Decentralized digital identity |
A trusted digital identity that people (and businesses) can securely share with entities that request it, without relying on a central data repository or bits of paper. |
| Deep learning |
A rapidly evolving machine learning technique used to build, train, and test neural networks that probabilistically predict outcomes and/or classify unstructured data. |
| Deep process applications |
The complex, mission-critical efforts that were the domain
of traditional BPM. While those remain relevant, DPAs extend that definition
to a wide array of more basic, situational process apps that are best led by business users with minimal IT support. |
| De-identification |
Technology and processes that prevent a personal identity from being attributed to other descriptive information. |
| Design system |
A design system is a set of principles, foundations, components, guidelines, and resources that an organization creates and continually evolves to guide its design efforts. |
| Design thinking |
A method for problem-solving and innovation based on longstanding practices among professional designers and codified into five activities (related but not sequential) to be more accessible to others: 1) empathizing; 2) defining; 3) ideating; 4) prototyping; and 5) testing. |
| DevOps |
Development and operations working together with business
sponsors and quality assurance to deliver a continuous stream of innovation
into production. |
| Digital accessibility |
The extent to which customers are able to get value out of a digital experience regardless of variations in their abilities.
|
| Digital advertising fraud |
Reaping financial rewards through the deployment of
technologies that mislead advertisers on where their ads are running and/or
who or what is clicking and interacting with those ads. |
| Digital asset management |
Technology that organizations use to manage the creation, production, distribution, and retention of rich media content such as audio, video, images, and compound documents |
| Digital banking engagement
platforms |
An advanced cross-channel/omnichannel banking solution that enables an integrated, seamless, and comprehensive customer and employee experience across touchpoints, thus delivering true digital banking. |
| Digital banking platform |
A comprehensive, but basically modular, pre-integrated set of banking applications designed to cover areas like retail and corporate banking. Further, digital banking platforms are comprised of core banking functions and support processes in near real time, provide insightful information, allow rapid product development, and enable efficient management of customer experience (CX) across technology channels and customer touchpoints. |
| Digital bonding |
Any type of collaborative connection — enterprise-to-enterprise, person-to-person, or enterprise-to-person — facilitated by one party's software connecting to, communicating with, or leveraging the other party's software.
|
| Digital business |
A digital business harnesses digital assets and ecosystems to continually improve customer outcomes and, simultaneously, increases operational effectiveness. |
| Digital business design |
A business-centric approach to solution architecture,
implementation, and integration that brings business and technology design
together by placing design priority on aspects of a business such as user
roles, business transactions, processes, canonical information, and events. |
| Digital business platform |
A modular technology base built around business
application programming interfaces (APIs) and designed for the rapid
reconfiguration of business models, processes, and ecosystems. |
| Digital business transformation accelerators |
Service providers with capabilities to research markets, shape effective digital transformation strategy, accelerate the build and test of prototype digital products using proven IP, integrate and scale the products in target markets, and successfully guide the necessary changes to continuously transform the business. |
| Digital content
transformation |
An enterprise-capable service to digitize inbound content,
including mobile, office formats, page description languages, web formats,
and semistructured formats, to support improved customer experience and
operational excellence. |
| Digital core banking |
An element of digital banking platform architecture that focuses on provisioning business capabilities, workflows, and processes but which excludes data storage. It allows banks to build new business capabilities without changing their traditional core banking systems. |
| Digital creepiness |
A customer's feeling that a digital experience offered by
a company knows more about them than it should and is using that information
in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable. |
| Digital customer
experience strategy |
A plan that guides the activities and resource allocation
needed to deliver experiences that meet or exceed customers' expectations
within and across digital interaction points. |
| Digital customer
experience technologies |
Solutions that enable the management, delivery, and
measurement of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers, products, and
service interactions across digitally enabled consumer touchpoints. |
| Digital decisioning platforms |
Software that provides tools to author decision logic, leverage decision intelligence technologies such as machine learning, use digital decisions in a wide variety of applications, and manage the full decision logic lifecycle including feedback loops to continuously improve decision logic. |
| Digital decisions |
Business decision logic defined by business experts, informed by analytics, and embedded in applications to make real-time, repeatable operational and/or customer engagement decisions that establish a fact, identify a pattern, make a choice, trigger a process, determine policy compliance, route an event, and/or surface knowledge. |
| Digital disruption |
A mindset that bypasses traditional analog barriers,
eliminating the gaps and boundaries that prevent people and companies from
giving customers what they want in the moment that they want it. |
| Digital employee
experience |
A personalized set of interactions, processes, and content
resources that enables every employee to achieve success and enjoy a positive
work experience. |
| Digital engagement
provider |
A digital engagement provider has a complete portfolio of
engagement competencies and management skills to help you build and deliver
great digital experiences at global scale. |
| Digital experience agencies
|
Partners that can help companies design, build, and manage digital customer experiences in the context of their digital business transformation.
|
| Digital experience
delivery roadmap |
A plan that matches short-term and long-term digital
experience delivery goals with specific technology solutions. |
| Digital experience
delivery vendors |
Third-party service providers that help create digital
experiences through creative design and/or strategy and implement technology
solutions — such as content management, digital analytics, and e-commerce
platforms — that support digital experiences. |
| Digital experience development platform |
A software platform that enables organizations to rapidly create an integrated portfolio of digital experiences across a variety of end user channels.
|
| Digital experience
governance |
Structures and processes that align goals and assign
decision rights for digital customer experience strategy and technology
across the enterprise and with external partners like systems integrators and
digital agencies. |
| Digital experience monitoring |
A set of capabilities that helps the modern enterprise deliver stellar digital CX by identifying any symptoms that contribute to performance issues, downtime, or other disruptions to the customer's interactions with digital services. It assesses the root cause of these issues that affect overall CX and can recommend solutions to support teams. |
| Digital experience platforms |
A platform that provides the architectural foundation and modular services for developers and practitioners to create, orchestrate, and optimize digital journeys at scale — to drive loyalty and new commerce outcomes across owned and third-party channels. |
| Digital insurers |
Digital insurers use digital technologies to find new ways of assessing and pricing risk; manage fraud; sell policies; automate internal processes; and offer new products managed entirely through digital touchpoints. |
| Digital intelligence |
The capture, management, and analysis of customer data and insights to deliver a holistic view of customers' digital interactions for the purposes of continuously innovating and optimizing business decisions, operations, and customer engagements. |
| Digital intelligence
technology |
Technology that enables the capture, management, and
analysis of customer data and insights to optimize digital customer
interaction and experience across the customer lifecycle. |
| Digital money management |
A set of integrated online and mobile tools for money
management, typically including but not limited to account aggregation,
automatic spending categorization, budgeting, and goal setting. |
| Digital native |
A person born after the mid-1990s who has been raised in a
world in which the internet and mobile are commonplace. |
| Digital operations platform |
The core enterprise applications that are necessary for digital business and which are the foundation for business operations and customer experiences — although often behind the scenes. Example categories in the DOP are operations, product configuration, supply chain, product engineering, logistics, and billing. The DOP can be comprised of individual solutions but is often based on a suite of solutions built to work together. |
| Digital performance management |
The optimizing of customer experience and business key
performance indicators (KPIs) through comprehensive performance monitoring
and analysis of technology, application, and business metrics. |
| Digital process automation service provider |
A professional services firm that supports clients' process automation initiatives with expertise in the areas of process automation, business strategy, customer experience, and organizational change management.
|
| Digital product development service firms |
Digital product development service firms conceive, design, develop, launch, and scale new digital products that directly drive new revenue for clients — revenue which is typically differentiated from the client firm's historic revenue model. |
| The digital self |
The total collection of digital information relevant to
me, including what I create and collect as well as information about me that
others create or collect. |
| Digital signature and trust services providers |
Products and services that enable the digital transformation of business processes and operations that require a legally binding agreement between parties, whose digital identities have been previously attributed and contextually verified. |
| Digital store experience
technologies |
Technologies that link or enhance a retail physical store
experience with an online experience for customers. |
| Digital store operations
technologies |
In-store technologies that retailers use to help their
physical store teams and operations perform better and become more efficient
by understanding customer behavior, gleaning customer insights, and spurring
real-time action by store staff. |
| Digital store technologies |
In-store technologies that
retailers use either to help their physical store teams and operations
perform better or to link or enhance a retail physical store experience with
an online experience for customers. |
| Digital track and trace |
The technology that enables organizations to determine past and current locations of an asset as well as other contextual data that affects the asset. |
| Digital transformation agencies |
Service providers that help business leaders build digital experiences, develop and launch digital products, and innovate on business models, operations, and technology. |
| Digital transformation services |
Services providers bringing a portfolio of transformation capabilities to help clients harness digital assets, skills, and ecosystems to continuously improve customer outcomes, drive revenue growth, and increase operational effectiveness, while minimizing risk from changing market conditions. |
| Digital twin |
A digital representation of a physical thing's data, state, relationships, and behavior. |
| Digital VoC specialist |
A system of software and processes that supports a company's digitally focused VoC efforts by helping a company to solicit feedback from key customers across digital channels, collect solicited and unsolicited feedback, analyze structured and unstructured feedback, distribute insights to key stakeholders across the organization, close the loop with customers, act on the insights, and monitor progress continuously.
|
| Digital wallet |
A service that lets consumers manage digitized valuables
(offers, coupons, loyalty rewards, tickets, boarding passes, gift cards, IDs,
electronic receipts, or product information) from multiple brands and that
enables payment transactions. |
| Digital wealth management platform |
A platform that offers digital solutions to optimize the client experience and increase financial advisor productivity across the entire investor lifecycle. |
| Digital worker analytics |
Platforms and methodologies that support automated and systematic approaches to collaborate, capture, structure, analyze, standardize, document, and rank human desktop and browser activity to help standardize, design, and build digital workers for task automation and greater intelligence. |
| Direct call deflection |
Calls that were deflected from the call center because a
customer posted a question in the community and found an answer there. |
| Direct-to-value |
An aspirational approach to customer relationships wherein the brand aspires to deliver as much value as it can, as directly as it can, to the customer. |
| Disaster recovery as a service |
A pay-per-use managed service that uses cloud-based
infrastructure and continuous replication technologies; in the case of an
outage, it orchestrates the transition of applications to recovery
infrastructure to deliver a resilient business service. |
| Distributed ledger technology |
A software architecture that supports collaborative processes around trusted data and is shared and distributed across organizational (and potentially national) boundaries. |
| Document output for
customer communications management |
Software used to compose, format, personalize, and
distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications
and improve the customer experience. |
| DPA-deep solutions |
Software used to compose, format, personalize, and
distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications
and improve the customer experience. |
| Dynamic ad insertion |
A system that provides flexibility to tailor ad
decisioning and insertion as the TV video stream is being played, based on
time, device, distribution channel, or individual viewer. |
| Dynamic case management |
A highly structured, collaborative, dynamic, and
information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires
incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling a
case. |
| E |
| EA management suite |
A packaged application in the form of an integrated set of
modules addressing a range of EA functions and objectives. |
| Earned media |
Media exposure or publicity that a company gains in channels that it does not own, typically derived from usage of a company's product or service, customer experience, or marketing efforts.
|
| EA service |
An EA service provides a defined output with a specific value to the recipients through a combination and configuration of capabilities and deliverables. |
| E-commerce enabler |
A service provider that facilitates brands' and retailers' online retail efforts on marketplaces and beyond with services including e-commerce strategy, store operations, marketing, supply chain and logistics, and customer service. |
| Edge computing |
A family of technologies that distributes application data and services where they can best optimize outcomes in a growing set of connected assets. It includes edge infrastructure and edge analytics software. |
| eDiscovery service providers |
Service providers that offer legal professionals expertise and support with eDiscovery capabilities and processes, such as consulting services to advise on strategy, processes, and technologies; managed services for eDiscovery workflows and processes; document review services; digital investigations and forensics services; and more. |
| eDiscovery technologies |
Tools that provide capabilities to help organizations streamline and operationalize defensible eDiscovery process activities in response to discovery requests triggered by events such as litigation, internal investigations and audits, freedom of information requests, and regulatory action. |
| eGovernment networks |
Resilient structures of interdependent public and private
sector entities cooperating in real time over the internet. |
| Elastic application
platform |
An application platform that automates the elasticity of
application transactions, services, and data, delivering high availability
and performance using elastic resources. |
| Email marketing vendors |
A group of firms that provide technology to create email messages, optimize email content, and design, deliver, and ensure receipt of email messages for marketing purposes.
|
| Embedded mapping |
A digital representation of the physical world with layers of data, algorithms, and applications. |
| Emerging technology |
The practical application of emergent technical knowledge in new and mature products, services, and solutions. |
| Employee advocacy program |
The use of B2B marketing and EX strategy, budget, and resources to encourage employees to advocate, publish content, activate media, or influence buyers on behalf of your company. |
| Employee brand advocacy |
Embedding the brand North Star into the day-to-day
operations of the business and evangelizing employees to deliver a superior
brand experience for customers, however they choose to interact. |
| Employee-centric design |
Aligning technology with employee behaviors during
specific work tasks to drive actions that achieve the outcomes that both the
employee and the business desire. |
| Employee experience |
Employees’ perceptions of their experiences working within an organization. |
| Employee experience automation |
A combination of IA building blocks, such as conversational intelligence and RPA, that work alongside employees. They understand human intent, respond to questions, and take action on the human's behalf, leaving humans with control, authority, and an enhanced experience. |
| Employee experience consulting practice |
A consultancy that supports a company's efforts to change how employees engage with their employer through vision setting and strategy building, as well as transforming management structures, employee enablement, culture, organizational structures, and communication. |
| Empowered brand health |
The ability of a brand to manage the collective real-time
consumer opinions and behaviors that affect a brand's public perception or
performance. |
| Enablement |
Providing employees and partners with the resources they need to deliver the right experiences. |
| Endpoint detection and
response |
Endpoint technologies that: 1) collect telemetry data from
systems, 2) perform anomaly detection for the purpose of alerting, 3) enable
analysts to perform investigations using collected telemetry, and 4)
facilitate a response to incidents. |
| Endpoint security Saas |
Endpoint security services/functions hosted by a third
party, billed on a pay-per-use model, and delivered via a multitenant
architecture. |
| End-user experience management |
A set of client-side capabilities that helps I&O pros manage the daily technology experience of employees by collecting and analyzing telemetry data from employee devices, apps, networks, and authentication mechanisms. These agent-based solutions reside on the endpoint itself and help I&O pros identify and proactively remediate degradation in technology experience. |
| Engagement platform |
A platform that supports a distributed, four-tier
architecture engineered to deliver compelling experiences, outstanding
performance, and modular integration on any device over any network at
internet scale. |
| Enterprise architecture management suite |
A tool used by EA pros for capturing, managing, and reporting on a firm's strategic and operational assets, defining the relationships between those assets, and assessing the effectiveness and efficiencies of those assets with the purpose of providing insights that may influence or guide the strategic direction of the firm. |
| Enterprise blockchain platform |
An integrated software foundation (a software suite, a collection of public cloud services, and/or business solutions) with technology consulting and implementation services that uses blockchain frameworks at the core (used unaltered or optimized) to enable distributed collaborative processes around trusted data and is shared and distributed across organizational boundaries. |
| Enterprise business intelligence platform |
Enterprise software that turns raw data (transactional, operational, master) into signals and actionable insights. These platforms provide reporting, querying, descriptive analytics, data visualization, exploration, and dashboarding functionality as well as data integration, data storage, and advanced analytics based on machine learning and other AI capabilities. |
| Enterprise-class companies |
Companies that begin at 1,000 employees and include large
enterprises (5,000 to 19,999 employees) and Global 2000 enterprises (20,000
employees and up). |
| Enterprise container platform |
A software stack and/or set of managed cloud services that provide a container-based software development environment and container orchestration and management capabilities for development and operations (DevOps) teams to build, run, and manage container-based applications and infrastructure. |
| Enterprise content
delivery networks |
Overlay networks that manage the distribution of
web/streaming media content and related services in corporate intranets. They
extend or replace proxy/caches in corporate networks; enable scheduled
distribution of web content and rich media files to branch-office caches
during off-peak hours; and manage content in remote caches from a central
location. |
| Enterprise content
management |
A set of strategies and technologies that help information
workers find, use, and analyze digital information, from any place, at any
time, within the guardrails of corporate policies. |
| Enterprise data fabric |
Orchestrating disparate data sources intelligently and securely in a self-service manner, leveraging data platforms such as data lakes, data warehouses, NoSQL, translytical, and others to deliver a unified, trusted, and comprehensive view of customer and business data across the enterprise to support applications and insights. |
| Enterprise data
virtualization |
The integration of any data in real time or near real time
from disparate structured, unstructured, and semistructured data sources,
whether on-premises or cloud, into coherent data services that support
business transactions, analytics, predictive analytics, and other workloads
and patterns. |
| Enterprise data warehouse |
A repository of information that is used for reporting and
analytics. It includes key data management functions, such as concurrency,
security, storage, processing, SQL access, and integration. |
| Enterprise email security |
Technologies that protect organizations' email communications in order to mitigate and lessen the impact of email-borne attacks. These consist of on-premises or cloud-based email gateways and solutions that integrate with cloud-based email infrastructure. Capabilities include antispam, antimalware, antiphishing, data loss prevention (DLP), encryption, phishing education, business email compromise (BEC) and spoofing protection, malicious URL detection, and email authentication. |
| Enterprise feedback
management |
Software and processes that enable organizations to
centrally collect, analyze, and report on feedback from key customer groups
and tailor insights to various internal users. |
| Enterprise file sync and
share |
Technologies that allow organizations to share and
replicate content across multiple devices, distributing ï¬les to employees
and/or customers or partners outside the enterprise. |
| Enterprise fraud management |
A solution that integrates data from multiple payment and non-payment transaction processing systems, online portals, and threat information sources and provides transaction monitoring, risk scoring, case management, and reporting for online and offline, payment and non-payment transactions. |
| Enterprise governance |
A set of responsibilities and practices exercised by the
board and executive management with the goal of providing strategic
direction, ensuring that objectives are achieved, ascertaining that risks are
managed appropriately, and verifying that the enterprise's resources are used
responsibly. |
| Enterprise health clouds |
Platforms that provide secure, scalable, and HIPAA-compliant virtual data centers; that leverage healthcare interoperability frameworks, AI, and big data analytics to unlock siloed data and create a 360-degree view of the patient; and that empower HCOs to engage consumers with integrated development tools. |
| Enterprise information
management |
Processes, policies, technologies, and architectures that
capture, consume, and govern the usage of an organization's structured data
and unstructured content. |
| Enterprise insight
platform suites |
Integrated or partially integrated suites of data
management, analytics, and insight execution components that require some
integration and configuration to form a platform. |
| Enterprise marketing
software suite |
An integrated portfolio of marketing technology products
that provide analytics, automation, and orchestration of insight-driven
customer interactions to support inbound and outbound marketing. |
| Enterprise preference
management |
The business practice of systematically collecting,
managing, and utilizing explicit customer preferences — about frequency,
channel, content, interests, and intent — in outbound communications. These
preferences are managed in a centralized repository and collected in a
user-facing portal known as a preference center. |
| Enterprise resource
planning |
The applications that execute the end-to-end business
processes supporting a firm's business. ERP encompasses finance
(record-to-report), order management (order-to-cash), and procurement
(purchase-to-pay), as well as industry-specific functionality and applications
if required. |
| Enterprise service management |
Extending IT service management capabilities beyond technology services to address business-centric use cases; managing service demand and supply through a common platform, portal, and service catalog; and speeding up innovation and workflow automation through PaaS/low-code development tooling. |
| Entitlements |
Attributes of a user or a resource that dictate what kind
of access a user has to another resource after authentication; also known as
fine-grained authorizations. |
| eProcurement |
Software that helps company employees buy products and services from suppliers — from requisition, creation, and approval to purchase order management and invoice receipt and processing. |
| eProcurement products |
eProcurement products support the requisitioning and approval of employee purchases of indirect materials and maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO items, with employee-facing catalogs, punch-out to suppliers' catalogs, and catalog management tools). |
| ePurchasing |
The group of software tools that supports sourcing and
vendor management professionals in buying goods and services. |
| ERP hub operations |
The coordinating and consolidation processes of a
corporate headquarters. |
| eSourcing |
Software that streamlines the sourcing process by
generating requisitions, proposals, and information. It automates and
accelerates the process of choosing a supplier for recurring purchases of a
product or service by generating RFXs, distributing them to suppliers, and
scoring the responses. |
| eSourcing products |
eSourcing products support employee and team generation and distribution to suppliers of RFQ/RFP/RFIs and reverse auctions, with collaborative response scoring, the potential for multivariable complex sourcing and scoring, and sourcing team project and activity management. |
| Ethnography |
A descriptive account of social life and culture in a
particular social system, based on detailed observations of what people
actually do. |
| European security consulting services |
Services that help solve complex cybersecurity challenges by evaluating, developing, and improving all aspects of an enterprise security and risk program. Domains include setting cybersecurity strategy and vision, implementing security solutions, responding to threats and incidents, checking for compliance, and assessing the security health of systems. |
| Event performance management |
Technologies for managing, automating, and scaling digital and in-person events to provide an engaging attendee experience and increase the ROI of event sponsorship.
|
| Experience design (XD) |
Defining and refining experiences based on your vision and
research-based customer understanding. |
| Experience design provider |
A services firm that helps companies improve customer experiences and business outcomes by applying expert design practices. |
| Experience research |
Understanding your customers in depth and communicating that understanding to employees and partners. |
| Extended customer
management business process and solutions
ecosystem |
The business processes and supporting technologies that
support the key activities of targeting, acquiring, retaining, understanding,
and collaborating with customers. |
| Extended detection and response (XDR) |
The evolution of endpoint detection and response (EDR), which optimizes threat detection, investigation, response, and hunting in real time. XDR unifies security-relevant endpoint detections with telemetry from security and business tools such as network analysis and visibility (NAV), email security, identity and access management (IAM), cloud security, and more. It is a cloud-native platform built on big data infrastructure to provide security teams with flexibility, scalability, and opportunities for automation. |
| Extended enterprise |
An organization at which a business function is rarely, if
ever, a self-contained workflow within the confines of the company's
infrastructure. |
| External threat intelligence services |
Services that provide assessments of the intent, capabilities, and opportunities of threat actors in response to stakeholder requirements. External threat intelligence services enable clients to fill in gaps in their intelligence collection plans. They enrich and add valuable context to a client's internal security data. Use threat intelligence to inform business decisions and reduce risk from physical threats and cyberthreats. |
| F |
| Facial recognition |
A technology solution that stores an image of a face or a
set of its characteristics at enrollment time — called an enrollment sample —
and compares that stored sample with a live one to authenticate the user. |
| File analytics |
Software tools that are used to find and assess documents
(unstructured data) and provide insights into their sensitivity, age, or
type. |
| Finance performance
consulting |
Consulting services to help clients improve the strategic
direction and effectiveness of their financial operations, including
governance, risk management, cost containment, process improvement,
technology enablement, and decision-making capability. |
| Financial literacy |
A combination of awareness, knowledge, skills, attitude, and behavior, which are all necessary for an individual to make sound financial decisions and develop financial capability. |
| Financial services cloud |
Platforms and applications that provide secure, scalable, regulation-compliant cloud environments and use financial services interoperability frameworks, AI, big data analytics, blockchain, and the internet of things to create cost-effective, flexible financial services capabilities to customers in banking, insurance, and asset management. Financial services clouds unlock siloed data and make financial services firms more adaptive. |
| First-call resolution |
Solving new customer problems during the first interaction
with that customer. |
| Forrester's Consumer Energy Index |
Forrester's Consumer Energy Index provides an indication of customers' desire, readiness, and capability to increase their engagement with brands, based on taking the pulse of their sense of identity, level of trust, appetite for novelty, and perception of efficacy.
|
| Full-service digital
agencies |
Those that cover three categories of digital services:
digital strategy, digital marketing, and digital technology. |
| Future fit technology strategy |
A customer-obsessed approach to technology that enables a company to quickly reconfigure business structures and capabilities to meet future customer and employee needs with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience. |
| G |
| Gamification |
The insertion of game dynamics and mechanics into non-game
activities to drive a desired behavior. |
| Global EA |
An extension and modification of local and regional
architectures and EA practices to encompass a broader set of requirements and
challenges to pursuing IT strategy on a global scale. |
| Global merchant payment providers |
Technology enablers that provide merchants with access to the payment network to process payments globally. Services include: acquiring, processing, gateway, and security and fraud solutions. |
| Governance, risk
management, and compliance |
Coordinated functions to set and enforce the boundaries
within which an organization seeks to maximize performance. |
| Graph databases |
Optimized database technology to store, manage, and access
inter data to answer complex questions. |
| Graph data platform |
A specialized and cohesive set of technologies that uses a graph engine to store, process, and query connected data to answer complex questions and deliver new insights, running on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. |
| GRC technology |
A cumulation of workflow, content, analysis, assurance, reporting, and integration capabilities, for the purpose of automating and facilitating the process associated with governance, risk, and compliance efforts across a broad range of business functions. |
| Grid computing |
A computer network that enables distributed resource
management and on-demand services. |
| H |
| Hadoop-optimized systems |
Preconfigured hardware platforms comprising CPU, memory,
and/or disk that are optimized to run a Hadoop distribution, which includes
value-added tools, Hadoop ecosystem software, and/or add-ons appropriate for
use by enterprises. |
| Hadoop/Spark platforms |
Distributed computing software and services that are rooted in open source Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark to store, process, and analyze data to find and use insights to improve customer experiences, create timely business intelligence, optimize business processes, and make decision-making smarter and faster. |
| Hardcoded threats |
Vendor- or manufacturer-provided technology or code that
enables the illegitimate operation of an item. A hardcoded threat can be
electronic in nature, such as a code backdoor, a malicious firmware package,
a compromised code library, or an entire technology manufactured negligently
in regards to security procedures. |
| Healthcare analytics |
Analysis of complex data collected from healthcare, consumers, and other sources, such as the internet of things, used to gain insights on healthcare customers, individually or in aggregate, to enable actionable insights, automation, and streamlined workflows. |
| Healthcare CRM |
A customer relationship management system designed for HCOs to engage, attract, acquire, and retain customers as well as aggregate multiple types of data — including clinical, demographic, scheduling, financial, and more — to create insight into healthcare customers' activity and behavior. |
| Healthcare robotic process automation |
Technology vendors, consulting services providers, and business process outsourcing firms bringing robotic process automation to the healthcare market. These vendors help their clients automate clinical and operational workflows with secure, HIPAA-compliant, scalable frameworks. They deliver value through a mix of custom solution design, technology implementation, governance architecture, and knowledge transfer. |
| Healthcare unbound |
Technology in, on, and around the body that frees care
from formal institutions. |
| Heuristic evaluation |
A fast and inexpensive methodology for identifying user
experience problems with software, websites, and other channels. It
specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its
compliance with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics"). |
| High-bandwidth
entertainment users |
Consumers who engage in any one of the following
activities: viewing video online, downloading video, online action/fantasy
gaming, sharing files, and uploading files. |
| High-performance computing |
Large clusters, comprising compute, storage, and bandwidth, configured to minimize the time to run massive batch jobs that require very high volumes of calculations and/or data throughput typical of scientific research, simulation, and AI. |
| Hosted private cloud |
Cloud infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization serving a single internal consumer or multiple internal consumers (e.g., business units), even when not in use by that organization. It is managed and hosted off-premises in a vendor data center. Resources can be provisioned through a self-service portal, and this process is completely automated. |
| HR analytics |
A set of methodologies, processes, and technologies that
transforms raw HR data into meaningful information to support strategic,
tactical, and operational decision-making. |
| Human-factor-friendly
security |
The act of analyzing and addressing the impact of human
factors on the success of security controls in applications, products, or
services that the enterprise deploys to its own workforce or to its
customers. |
| Hybrid cloud management |
A software stack that delivers governance, visibility, lifecycle management, and optimization insights for multiple clouds across both public and private environments. |
| Hybrid cloud management
solution |
A cloud-agnostic standalone software solution that
automates cloud application and infrastructure service delivery, operations,
and governance across multiple cloud platforms. |
| Hybrid XDR |
An XDR platform that relies on integrations with third parties for the collection of other forms of telemetry and execution of response actions related to that telemetry. |
| Hyperadoption |
The rapid and simultaneous uptake of unprecedented
behaviors. |
| Hyperconvergence |
An approach to technology infrastructure that packages
server, storage, and network functions into a modular unit and adds a
software layer to discover, pool, and reconfigure assets across multiple
units quickly and easily. These systems can be implemented as software plus
modular physical units or as a software overlay on top of existing
infrastructure. |
| Hypervisor |
A control software layer that enables multiple operating
systems to run on the same physical hardware. |
| I |
| IAM for IoT |
A collection of existing and emerging technologies that
allow manufacturers, operators, and end users to manage the identity life
cycle, governance, and authentication of internet-of-things devices. |
| Identity and access management |
The policies, processes, and technologies that digital businesses employ to establish identities and control access to their resources across dynamic ecosystems of value. |
| Identity graph |
The identity graph maps relationships between people, data, and devices by cataloging and connecting the identifiers that represent the entities that brands engage with to make them addressable. |
| Identity resolution
|
The process of integrating identifiers across available touchpoints and devices with behavior, transaction, and contextual information into a cohesive and addressable consumer profile for marketing analysis, orchestration, and delivery. |
| Inclusive design |
Designing experiences that are effective, easy, and emotionally positive for all customers in a target market by factoring in its variations in age, ability, language, culture, gender, and other traits. |
| Industrial IoT software platforms |
Software solutions that connect to and manage smart devices and infrastructure in industrial and manufacturing environments to integrate operational data and control into business processes. |
| Influencers |
Mainstream journalists, industry analysts, subject matter experts, independent bloggers, and certain social media celebrities who have influence in a specific topic or category and are not customers or employees of the brand. |
| Information archiving |
Technologies that migrate digital information (in the form of structured data, application data, documents, files, email, content, or social media) from source systems into a repository, retaining the information for a specified period. Solutions may be specialized for one specific data type (such as email), or be broad and comprehensive, supporting multiple data or content types. |
| Information fabric 3.0 |
The integration of any data in real time or near real time
from disparate data sources, whether internal or external, into coherent data
services that support business transactions, analytics, predictive analytics,
and other workloads and patterns. |
| Information governance |
A holistic strategy for using and managing information to
meet business objectives. Information governance ensures the quality of
content and data, maximizes its value, and ensures that security, privacy,
and life-cycle requirements are met. |
| Information life-cycle
management |
Includes a range of meanings, from basic archiving to
database-driven content management tools and solutions for regulatory
compliance. Both storage and software vendors offer information life-cycle
management products: Storage vendors focus on hardware awareness; software
vendors focus on creating rich metadata and integrating with business
processes. |
| Information workers |
An adult 18-plus years of age, employed at least 30 hours per week, who uses a smartphone, tablet, or PC for work at least 1 hour on a typical workday. |
| Infrastructure automation platforms |
Tools that automate the management of infrastructure, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. They integrate with enterprise service management platforms, DevOps pipelines, configuration management databases (CMDBs) and other types of automation. They support enterprise efforts via analytics and reporting, policy management, and compliance. |
| In-memory database |
A database that stores all or most critical data in DRAM,
flash, and SSD on either a single or distributed server to support various
types of workloads, including transactional, operational, and/or analytical
workloads, running on-premises or in the cloud. |
| In-memory data grids |
Software tools and technologies that are architected to
use chip-based random access memory (RAM) distributed across multiple nodes
to accelerate performance and achieve scalability of data access and compute. |
| In-memory data platform |
Low-latency access and high-performance processing of
large quantities of data by distributing data across DRAM, flash, and SSD in
a distributed clustered architecture. It supports both read and write
operations across various workload patterns, including transactional,
operational, and analytical. |
| Innovation |
The ability to continuously transform business processes, market offerings, or business models to boost value and impact for the enterprise, customers, or partners. |
| Insight PaaS |
An integrated set of data management, analytics, and
insight application development and management components, offered as a
platform that the enterprise does not own or control. |
| Insight platforms |
Platforms that unify the technologies to build
applications that manage and analyze data, test and integrate the derived
insights into business action, and capture feedback for continuous
improvement. |
| Insights-driven business |
One that harnesses and implements digital insights strategically and at scale to drive growth and create differentiating experiences, products, and services. |
| Insights-driven business process outsourcing providers |
Third-party suppliers that use advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics, including AI, machine learning, and automation, to manage customer interactions and customer-facing business processes on behalf of clients. This includes hiring, training, and managing agents; serving customers in existing voice channels; deploying new digital channels and developing processes for serving customers in them; and optimizing service processes. |
| Insights services |
Services that define specific functional or vertical business use cases, then combine data services, advanced analytics, and/or AI to deliver actionable business insights, with implementation support and monitoring to ensure successful business outcomes. |
| Insurance agency platforms |
Digital solutions, such as agency management systems and agency portals, that optimize the experiences of insurance agencies and existing and prospective customer; make it easier to place business with carriers; and elevate insurance agency productivity and efficiency throughout the policyholder lifecycle. |
| Insurtech |
Emerging technologies and services that enable insurance
firms to win, serve, and retain customers by continuously delivering new
customer value and increasing operational agility. |
| Integrated business
planning |
Applications or platforms that enable a single company or a network of companies to align sales, operations, and finance functions to synchronize enterprise or network assets and product availability with a global view of customer demand and supply constraints. |
| Integrated business
services |
A business operating model in which small, persistent,
multiskilled teams are responsible for conceptualizing, implementing, and
delivering ongoing value through highly variable work that spans existing
processes, technologies, and organizations. |
| Integration platform |
Technologies that simplify and reduce the cost of developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining application and data interfaces. |
| Integration strategy and
delivery service provider |
A consulting firm or systems integrator that, in addition
to delivering solutions that employ integration products, is organized to
assist technology user enterprises to design, establish, and mature their
organizational competency and strategy for leveraging multiple styles of
integration. |
| Intelligent content
services |
A semantically smart, content-centric set of software
services that enhances the relationship between people and computing systems
by making sense of content, recognizing context, and understanding the end
user's requests for information. |
| Intelligent creativity |
A process of creative problem-solving in which teams of creators and strategists conceive, design, produce, and activate business solutions with the assistance of AI, intelligent automation, and data. |
| Intelligent document extraction platforms |
Platforms that leverage AI (both knowledge-based and ML-based) to automate document, forms, and email-based processes to classify, route, and extract insights from text and images. |
| Intelligent process automation |
The combination of AI building blocks, such as computer vision, text analytics, and machine learning, with the task automation strength of robotic process automation. |
| Interactive voice response |
A system that uses a customer database to direct incoming
calls, reducing the time agents spend handling calls. Traditional IVR is
hardware that uses proprietary applications; doesn't support newer telecom
protocols needed for multichannel solutions; and is costly to install,
maintain, and customize due to hardware configuration and lack of standards
support. |
| Internal cloud |
A multitenant, dynamically provisioned and optimized
infrastructure with self-service developer deployment, hosted within the safe
confines of your own data center. |
| Internet finance |
Disruptive financial innovation initiated by internet
companies using digital technologies like big data, cloud computing, mobile
internet, instant messaging, and social media to develop faster, better, and
cheaper ways of serving consumers than the services that the traditional
financial industry provides. |
| Internet of things |
Technologies that enable objects and infrastructure to
interact with monitoring, analytics, and control systems over internet-style
networks. |
| Intranet |
A trusted digital source of corporate communication and content designed to educate and empower employees and improve their workplace experiences. |
| Invalid impressions |
Display and video ad impressions on desktops and laptops
that are not seen by real people. |
| I&O agility |
The ability to manage continuous, fast, and sustainable
change to ensure the transformation toward technology management with a
long-term, strategic perspective. |
| I&O complexity |
A period of change in infrastructure and operations during
which an organization tries to control a new technological environment using
obsolete methods and processes. |
| IoT consultancies |
Service providers that have dedicated or concentrated expertise and offerings to deliver internet of things (IoT) capabilities. |
| IoT device OS |
A lightweight operating system that runs on diverse IoT devices, manages device hardware and software resources, and provides common services and APIs for IoT connectivity, management, security, computing, and analytics. |
| IoT-enabled cold chain monitoring |
Monitoring and controlling conditions (e.g., temperature, humidity, or vibration) for perishable food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other products when they are in storage or transit. |
| IoT-enabled environmental monitoring |
Sensor-enabled solutions that assess the level of contaminants in air, soil, and water or evaluate temperature, humidity, lighting, or other indoor or outdoor environmental elements. |
| IoT software platforms |
Software solutions that connect to and manage smart
devices and infrastructure in order to integrate operational data and control
into business and customer processes. |
| iPaas |
An integration platform provided as a vendor-managed cloud service. |
| IP billing |
Software used by communications service providers to bill
customers for IP-based services; a niche part of the customer care and
billing market. |
| IP management exchange
(IPMX) |
A service, residing in the network, operated by a neutral
provider that mediates quality of service, revenue settlement, and
performance management among different carrier networks. |
| IT financial management |
The processes and tools necessary to provide IT leaders with the key capabilities to effectively account for, manage, and analyze IT costs and communicate their value to the business. |
| iWorkers |
People who use computers in their jobs (information
workers). |
| J |
| Jailbreaking |
Bypassing an app store to distribute applications after
installing unsupported software. |
| Journey management |
The practices of journey mapping, journey visioning, and journey orchestration, to improve customer experiences and business results across all phases of the customer lifecycle. |
| Journey orchestration |
The use of real-time data at the individual customer level to analyze current behavior, predict future behavior, and adjust the journey in the moment for increased customer lifetime value, operational efficiency, and business results. |
| Journey map |
A detailed visual representation of a journey that may be hypothetical (if based on assumptions) or evidence-based (if based on research). |
| K |
| Knowledge management
solutions |
Software used to create, publish, and maintain curated
content, enabling employees to answer internal and customer-facing questions,
and customers to find answers via web or mobile self-service. |
| L |
| L2RM business system |
Integrated tools and process automation that help B2B
marketers improve revenue performance. Holistic, tightly integrated tools
attract and qualify potential customers, generate new business opportunities,
and improve a buyers' propensity to purchase, while coordinating marketing,
sales, and service activities throughout the customer lifecycle. |
| Lead management automation |
Tools and processes that help generate new business
opportunities, manage volumes of business inquiries, improve potential
buyers' propensity to purchase, and increase alignment between marketing
activity and sales results. |
| Lead nurturing |
A sustained relationship with influencers and
decision-makers at a potential customer. A firm delivers relevant, valuable
insight to a potential customer via integrated channels in exchange for
increasing intimacy and influence that results in shorter sales cycles,
higher close rates, smaller discounts, and larger deals. |
| Lead-to-revenue management |
A business system for marketers with a long, complex, or
highly considered buying process; it comprises integrated goals, processes,
and metrics that drive effective customer engagement across the customer life
cycle from awareness to advocacy. It is measured through the metric of
revenue performance — from new customer acquisition through lifetime value. |
| Lean software |
An approach to building, delivering, and running software
that values fit-to-purpose, simplicity, and time-to-results above all. It
minimizes complexity, startup time, and resource usage and avoids features
and methods not essential to fulfilling the application's business purpose.
Developers can combine Lean software components with others when large
systems require more features. |
| Learning applications |
The electronic delivery of training material. |
| Life insurance policy administration systems |
A system of record that supports the administration of life and annuity products throughout the customer lifecycle. The system can support both individual and group and voluntary life insurance and annuity needs. |
| Local service agreement |
A contract that modifies a global or master service
agreement to address the specific needs of a region or country. |
| Location intelligence |
The practice of collecting and managing customer location data, enriching it with other data sources and analyzing for contextual insights for the purposes of informing optimized actions, decisions, and customer experiences.
|
| Location intelligence platform |
A cohesive set of location data management, analytics, execution software, and data products to enable enterprises to synchronize and optimize customer experiences, business decisions, and actions. |
| Location-predictive
marketing |
Predicting a person's future locations and needs on the
basis of his or her past locations and needs. |
| Low-code development
platforms |
Products and/or cloud services for application development
that employ visual, declarative techniques instead of programming and are
available to customers at low or no cost in money and training time to begin;
costs rise in proportion to the business value of the platforms. |
| Low-code platforms |
Platforms that enable rapid application delivery with a
minimum of hand-coding, and quick setup and deployment, for systems of
engagement. |
| Loyalty management |
The back-end orchestration of loyalty initiatives and
programs. |
| Loyalty marketing |
The execution of loyalty initiatives across channels. |
| Loyalty marketing vendors |
Services and technology providers that help marketers build and execute strategies — including tactics such as loyalty programs — that foster, retain, and deepen relationships with existing customers. |
| Loyalty strategy
development |
The research, planning, and design of loyalty strategies,
initiatives, and programs. |
| M |
| M2M technologies |
Technologies that collect and transfer information on the
condition of physical assets or people. |
| Machine learning data catalog |
A machine learning data catalog (MLDC) discovers, profiles, interprets, and applies semantics and data policies to data and metadata using machine learning to enable data governance and DataOps, helping analysts, data scientists, and data consumers turn data into business outcomes. |
| Managed detection and response |
A fully managed security service that includes the application of advanced security analytics, proactive threat hunting, and incident response investigative capabilities along with security automation orchestration (SOAR) for automated, manual, and on-demand response actions based on predefined and custom escalation workflows. |
| Managed hosting |
A generalized technology delivery mechanism that usually
involves administrating server infrastructure on a client's behalf up to the
operating system level in the supplier's data center. |
| Managed identity and access management services providers |
Services providers that offer security and risk managed services across the full range of IAM disciplines (including identity lifecycle management, governance, privileged identity management, and access management) as well as implementation and consulting services to advise on IAM strategy, technology deployment, multitenant service delivery, process automation, and a one-to-many support model to maximize economics of scale and more. |
| Managed security service providers |
Third-party organizations that continuously and remotely manage and monitor security technologies for customers. The four primary MSSP domains include, but are not limited to: perimeter and network security, application security, endpoint security, and identity and access management. MSSPs offer multitenant service delivery, automation, and a one-to-many support model to maximize economies of scale. |
| Managed service provider |
A third-party organization that remotely manages
technology resources for customers in four technology areas: network and
telecommunications, hardware infrastructure, applications, and security. MSPs
employ a one-to-many support model based on low-labor content and low price
points to maximize economies of scale. |
| Market and competitive intelligence solution |
A solution that enables users to search for and analyze diverse information sources about competitors and market context by AI-assisted collection, curation, and tagging of data and information from internal and external sources. Users then leverage templates, dashboards and collaboration features to share actionable insights across their organization. |
| Marketing dashboard |
A highly visual decision support application to
consolidate, measure, monitor, and distribute operational and key performance
indicators related to marketing activity. |
| Marketing measurement and optimization solutions |
Platforms that aggregate data about all factors that affect marketing performance; apply statistical techniques that assign business value to each element of the marketing mix at a strategic and tactical level; and/or provide tools to optimize marketing performance against business impact in the planning and execution of marketing activities. |
| Marketing mix modeling |
The use of statistical analysis to estimate, optimize, and
predict the impact that paid, owned, and earned multichannel marketing
tactics have on key metrics like business revenue. |
| Marketing operating system |
The core organizational framework that ties marketing
systems, processes, and outcomes explicitly to the unique expectations of
discrete customer segments. |
| Marketing resource management |
A tool or suite of tools that helps marketers with financial planning, performance measurement, collaboration and calendaring, project management, content production, asset management, brand compliance, and marketing fulfillment. |
| Mass customization |
A product strategy in which customers can tailor a
product's appearance, features, or content to their own specifications to
achieve an individualized product experience. |
| Master data management |
Master data management solutions provide the capabilities to create the unique and qualified reference of shared enterprise data, such as customer, product, supplier, employee, site, asset, and organizational data. |
| Master service agreement |
The core contractual document that outlines all
overarching terms and conditions that will act as the basis for future
agreements. With an MSA in place, all future contract negotiations, such as
statements of work, are limited to engagement-specific terms and objectives. |
| Media agencies |
Marketing service providers that manage media investments through audience understanding, channel planning, vendor negotiation/buying, and continuous measurement/optimization to provide marketers with efficient and effective omnichannel consumer engagement. |
| Media buying |
The practice of sequencing digital advertising across
channels so that it is connected, relevant, and consistent with the
customer's stage in his or her lifecycle. |
| Merchant payment providers |
Technology enablers that provide merchants with access to the payment network to process payments globally. Services include acquiring, processing, gateway, security solutions, and, commonly, a number of other adjacent services. |
| Messaging app |
A typically private, one-to-one or one-to-few
communication and media tool optimized for mobile. |
| Microfulfillment center |
A smaller-scale localized fulfillment solution that uses automation to store, pick, and pack products for quick fulfillment. |
| Micro moment |
A mobile moment that requires only a glance, touch, or
sound to quickly identify and deliver information that one can either consume
or act on immediately. |
| Microservice |
A piece of code or complete application that does one thing and does it well. |
| Microservices strategy and
delivery service provider |
A consulting firm or systems integrator that, in addition
to delivering solutions that employ microservice architecture, is organized
to assist technology user enterprises to design, establish, and mature their
organizational competency and strategy for microservices. |
| Microsoft Business Applications service providers |
Microsoft Business Applications service providers have a portfolio of capabilities to implement and extend the value of Microsoft's business applications for the enterprise, which include Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Additional services include business and process consulting, experience design, migration, and ongoing support to help customers achieve business agility and cloud-fueled digital transformation. |
| Microvideo |
Video content that is 15 seconds or less in length. |
| Mixed reality (MR) |
The virtual overlay of contextual digital information into the real world using holographic objects, anchoring points, and six degrees of physical freedom for movement. |
| Mobile advertising
spending |
The portion of online advertising spending that is
directed toward mobile devices (i.e., smartphones and tablets). |
| Mobile and tablet commerce |
The purchase of retail goods, travel services, and daily
deals where the payment is captured on a mobile phone or tablet, without
speaking to anyone. This excludes purchases made at a retail point of sale
using a near field communication (NFC)-enabled device, purchases at vending
machines, click-to-call purchases, stock trades and investments, and bill
payments. |
| Mobile app gap |
When people want applications on a mobile device but find
that those apps aren't available. |
| Mobile containerization |
The act of providing a secure "container" or
workspace for enterprise applications to operate in while being isolated from
the non-containerized applications and processes running on the device. |
| Mobile engagement automation |
Technology that uses real-time and contextual insights to proactively engage with known users in the appropriate mobile moment across the customer lifecycle via a mobile device. |
| Mobile front-end testing |
Validation of functional and nonfunctional components of a
mobile application's user interface and local functionality. |
| Mobile image capture |
The use of a mobile device's camera to capture information
from a physical object (e.g., a driver's license or check) and the
digitization of this information via a mobile device. |
| Mobile intelligence |
The capture, management, and analysis of mobile customer
data to gain a holistic understanding of the customer experience that drives
the execution and optimization of mobile moments in sync with other
engagement channels. |
| Mobile messaging |
Any text or multimedia communication between two parties
(business-to-consumer, consumer-to-business, or consumer-to-consumer) that
occurs on a mobile phone, tablet, or other mobile device. |
| Mobile mind shift |
The expectation that I can get what I want in my immediate
context and moments of need. |
| Mobile moment |
A point in time and space when someone pulls out a mobile
device to get what they want in their immediate context. |
| Mobile search advertising
spending |
Ad spend from cost-per-click (CPC) rates on paid-for ads
resulting from mobile search. |
| Mobile traders |
Those who have bought or sold stocks, bonds, mutual funds,
or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) via the mobile channel in the past three
months. |
| Mobile video ads |
Advertisements that contain video content and appear in
the mobile web or app environment. |
| Mobile wallet |
A mobile service that lets customers manage digitized
valuables, such as offers, coupons, loyalty rewards, tickets, boarding
passes, gift cards, IDs, electronic receipts, or product information, from
multiple brands and enables payment transactions. |
| Mobility |
A business technology initiative that enables employees to work successfully and securely from any location with a wide variety of device, application, and network connectivity options for the purposes of improving employee productivity and engagement, maintaining business continuity, and ultimately deepening customer engagement. |
| ModelOps |
Tools, technology, and practices that enable cross-functional AI teams to efficiently deploy, monitor, retrain, and govern AI models in production systems. |
| Modern application delivery |
The process of software development and delivery from idea to deployment that is customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected. |
| Modern application
functional test automation tools |
Testing software that provides testers and developers with
the ability to define an unlimited number of arbitrary test cases for both
user interfaces (UIs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) that can
be run continuously throughout the application development lifecycle to
minimize business risk. |
| Modern-day marketplace |
A business model where a governed environment allows third parties to offer products, services, or information to an audience and where the transaction is facilitated by the marketplace owner and fulfilled by the third party. |
| Modern enterprise firewalls |
Modern enterprise firewalls support original firewall use cases, blocking and allowing traffic via policy based on networks and ports. They also include "next-generation" content inspection to make policy decisions based on user identification and application context. They detect and block malicious content using signature-based detection and/or automated malware analysis and integrate with the security operations center (SOC) for forensics and incident response. They have centralized management, integrate with public cloud infrastructure, support hybrid delivery options to be partially or fully cloud-delivered, and are informed and assisted by cloud-delivered threat intelligence. |
| Modern sales enablement |
A business function that helps all selling systems work in an effective, efficient, and coordinated manner in order to increase revenue lift, minimize costs associated with sales, and deliver more meaningful experiences to buyers. |
| Modern service delivery |
A new lifecycle that can quickly deliver and make
iterative changes through an automated software delivery pipeline, enabling
organizations to win, serve, and retain customers with quality products or
services. |
| Modern technology operations |
Methodologies that focus on the platforms, processes, and ongoing delivery capabilities required for digitally enabled customer value. By using enterprise service management, digital experience monitoring, employee tech experience management, innovative service ecosystems, continuous delivery, and automation, modern technology operations support innovation, deliver better customer and employee experience, reduce enterprise risks, and optimize the efficiency of technology service delivery in pursuit of organizational goals. |
| Moonshots |
Innovations that create net-new values to address emerging customer needs, transform forthcoming market scarcities to abundances, or create novel capabilities that dramatically empower users. |
| Multichannel capture |
Software that scans, captures, indexes, retrieves,
processes, and archives digital images, electronic documents, and electronic
forms. |
| Multichannel routing |
Various channels for customer service, including the
phone, online chat, and email. |
| Multicloud managed services provider |
A set of suppliers offering services such as monitoring, patching, and other operational "run" services for multiple public cloud offerings, not just a single public cloud platform. Suppliers of managed services typically offer other types of services as well, including — but not limited to — advisory services, such as strategy, and build services, such as cloud-native development. |
| Multidimensional view of
the customer |
A view of the customer that uses all available information
about them — including information pertaining to psychographics, social
networks, smart devices, geolocation, and internet usage — to deliver
individualized and contextual products, services, and experiences. |
| Multimodel data platform |
A common data platform that provides storage, processing, and access to any data, whether structured, unstructured, or semistructured, and supports multiple data models such as document, graph, relational, and key-value for applications and insights. |
| Multimodal omnichannel |
The ability to serve customers via multiple channels in parallel/synchronously (e.g., video/voiceconferencing, chat, and cobrowsing), thus creating a single multimodal touchpoint. |
| Multisourcing |
The provisioning and blending of services from a set of
internal and external providers with the same overall business goal. |
| Multitenancy |
Technology architectures that let multiple customers
(tenants) share the same applications and/or compute resources securely,
reliably, and with consistent performance. |
| N |
| Nanotechnology |
The exploitation of quantum mechanical and special properties of matter at dimensions of 1 to 100 nanometers that enable new technologies and innovations in fields like biology, chemistry, materials, medicine, and physics. |
| Native advertising |
Any form of paid or sponsored content that directly and
transparently contributes to the experience of the site or platform where it
appears, by aligning with the format, context, or purpose of that site's or
platform's editorial content. |
| Native mobile application
authentication |
A user providing his or her credentials for authentication
in a native mobile application, which usually runs on Android, iOS, or
Windows Phone operating systems. |
| Native XDR |
An XDR suite that integrates with other security tools from their portfolio for the collection of other forms of telemetry and execution of response actions related to that telemetry. |
| Natural language generation (NLG) |
Rules, templates, and machine-learning-based technologies that turn data (structured, unstructured, and semi-structured) into grammatically correct narratives, explanations, summaries, and/or conversational content that is indistinguishable from human-authored content. |
| Nearshoring |
When a supplier is given work to reduce production costs
and is located in a country close or adjacent to the country where the client
is located. This is done to decrease time zone differences and cultural
disparities while increasing oversight opportunities. Nearshoring is also
part of an offshoring strategy to reduce geographic risk of outsourcing to
only one country. |
| Network analysis and visibility |
Network analysis and visibility is a category of products that includes network discovery tools for finding and tracking assets, flow data tools to track traffic patterns and user behaviors, packet capture and analysis tools that function like a DVR, and network forensic tools that assist in incident response. |
| New productivity platforms |
Platforms that speed application delivery and ongoing
evolution through visual tools; hot deployment and continuous innovation;
built-in administration and management; and the active participation of
business experts in application delivery. |
| Next-generation portfolio
management |
Integrated practices, tools, and cultural shifts that
enable organizations to integrate strategic planning with operational
execution. It allows them to view both portfolios simultaneously, fed by
real-time operational metrics and strategic goals to measure and optimize
business performance. |
| Niche social networks |
Online communities of like-minded individuals who share
content, participate in conversations, and provide expertise about
specialized, unique, or regional topics. |
| Non-human identities |
Machine-based identities in the workforce performing complex tasks that imitate human decision-making and/or perform tasks in conjunction with human operators. Types of non-human identities include robotic process automation (bots), robots (industrial, enterprise, medical, military, etc.), and IoT devices that perform complex tasks or work in conjunction with human operators. |
| NoOps |
The goal of completely automating the deployment,
monitoring, and management of applications and the infrastructure on which
they run. |
| N-tier architecture |
The number of tiers in an application architecture, such
as two or three. |
| O |
| Object storage |
Storage of data that is broken into distinct segments,
each containing a unique identifier that allows for retrieval and integrity
verification of the data. |
| Offshoring |
When a company relocates a business process or piece of
work like manufacturing or IT operations from one country to another where
labor costs are much lower than the home country. |
| Omnichannel |
The coordination of traditional channels (marketing,
selling, fulfillment) and supporting systems to create a seamless and
consistent customer experience. |
| Omnichannel advertising |
The practice of sequencing all paid media across channels and devices so that it is connected, relevant, and consistent with the customer's stage in his or her lifecycle. |
| Omnichannel B2B commerce |
An integrated approached for selling to and servicing customers across all relevant traditional and digital channels. It is highlighted by customers having contextually relevant and positive experiences, regardless of preferred channel. |
| Omnichannel contact center outsourcers |
Third-party suppliers that manage contact center operations on behalf of their customers with services that include hiring, training and managing agents, delivering customer service technologies developed in-house, conducting customer service over existing channels, deploying new service channels, and implementing and optimizing contact center processes. |
| Omnichannel media management |
Holistically planning, buying, optimizing, and generating insights across all paid media touchpoints and buying modalities to deliver relevant, connected advertising experiences to consumers throughout the purchase lifecycle. |
| Online advertising
spending |
The combined advertising spending via display, search, and
social channels across desktop/laptop and mobile devices; also referred to as
digital advertising spending. |
| Online company forum |
A brand-sponsored interactive environment where consumers
and marketers work together to improve a company's products and services. |
| Online engagement |
The level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and
influence an individual has with a brand or company online over time. |
| Online event technologies |
Technologies for managing, automating, and scaling digital events to provide an engaging remote attendee experience and to increase ROI by extending a physical event's reach, duration, and impact through an online version. |
| Online video platforms |
Technology solutions that capture, modify, or distribute live or on-demand video content through digital, mobile, and traditional channels to create video experiences that increase customer interest and engagement. |
| Open innovation |
The act of innovating for product strategy professionals
whereby new ideas or methods are requested from three broad participant
groups: internal constituents, partners, and customers. |
| Open source services |
Open source service providers deliver support, training,
education, consulting, and other services. Open source service suppliers
don't have a primary vendor that they look to for direction. Direction comes
from the community. Open source services are provided directly to developers,
customers, or users of the software. |
| Operating system security |
Considerations for OS security include audit
trail/logging, certification testing, integrated security features, OS
architecture, third-party products and support, standards compliance, and
documentation and training. |
| Operating unit location |
Where work is executed to optimize value delivered. "Where" isn't merely a physical location but a complex mix of entity (organization, corporation, function, partner, department, team, or individual); geography (country, state, city, campus, or building); distribution (local, global, or regional); format (independent, siloed, or integrated); and ownership (insourced, outsourced, or hybrid). |
| Operational-level
agreement |
An agreement between multiple suppliers and a client that
outlines a framework for achieving shared service-level agreements. |
| Operational resilience |
The ability of an organization to absorb the impact of any unexpected event without failing to deliver on its brand promise. |
| Operations support system |
The back-office infrastructure that gives service
providers the ability to create, deploy, manage, and maintain communication
services. Service providers rely on the OSS for billing information, customer
care, network and business management, inventory, engineering, planning and
maintenance functions. |
| Oracle applications implementation services providers |
Oracle applications implementation services providers have an extensive portfolio of capabilities to extend the value of Oracle applications beyond implementation services. These additional services include business and process consulting, experience design, and ongoing support to help customers achieve business change, leveraging their existing and planned Oracle investments. |
| Organizational change
management |
The process, tools, and techniques to manage the human
element of transformational change. These are applied in concert with project
management of a transition from one organizational structure, business
process, or technology to another. |
| Outcome management |
The continuous adjustment of technology management
resources to deliver business results — guided by a fast-cycle review of
desired outcomes relative to customer, resource, and budget constraints. |
| P |
| Package implementation
services |
Consultants and systems integrators who implement packaged
applications. |
| PAML solutions |
Software that provides enterprise data scientist teams and stakeholders with 1) tools to analyze data; 2) workbench tools to build predictive models using statistical and machine learning algorithms; 3) a platform to train, deploy, and manage analytical results and models; and 4) collaboration tools for extended enterprise teams including businesspeople, data engineers, application developers, DevOps, and AI engineers. |
| Partner relationship
management |
Dynamic business processes and underlying technology that
support targeting, recruiting, enabling, managing, understanding, and
collaborating with partners to deliver holistic solutions to customers. |
| Payment tokenization |
Solutions that replace personal account numbers with a token in payment transactions to help banks, merchants, and other stakeholders in the payment ecosystem avoid payment fraud and reduce the scope of compliance audits. |
| P&C claims management system/td>
| A system of record that manages the lifecycle of a property or casualty insurance claim, from first notice of loss through to settlement of the loss with the claimant. |
| People-led planning |
A marketing planning process that determines tactics that demonstrate your brand promise through interactions across a customer's journey and operates as an active, iterative cycle. |
| Perishable insights |
Urgent business situations (risks and opportunities) that
firms can only detect and act on at a moment's notice. |
| Perpetually connected
consumer |
A person who owns and personally uses at least three
connected devices and access the internet multiple times a day from multiple
physical locations, at least one of which is "on the go." |
| Persona |
A model of the key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and goals of a company’s target customers, created from primary research with real customers and taking the form of a vivid narrative description of a single person who represents a behavioral segment. |
| Personal cloud |
A set of personal devices and federated online services
configured and controlled by individuals that 1) organizes and preserves
personal or work information, documents, media, and communications; 2)
delivers that information to any device or service; and 3) orchestrates
integration of personal information across digital devices and online
services. |
| Personal digital twin |
An algorithm owned by an individual, optimized for his or her personal objectives. It filters content that is counterproductive to the individual's goals and identifies opportunities that support achieving them. |
| Personal identity and
data management |
The rules, standards, and processes by which individuals
and organizations manage, use, and share personal data and identity with
other individuals and organizations. |
| Personalization |
An experience that uses customer data and understanding to frame, guide, extend, and enhance interactions based on that person's history, preferences, context, and intent. |
| Personalized experience |
An experience that uses customer data and understanding to
frame, guide, extend, and enhance interactions based on that person's
history, preferences, context, and intent. |
| Personal value ecosystems |
The set of digitally connected products and services that
individuals combine to help satisfy their needs and desires. |
| Personas |
Models of the key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and
goals of a company's target customers, created from primary research with
real customers and taking the form of a vivid narrative description of a
single person who represents a behavioral segment. |
| Platform as a service |
A complete application platform for multitenant cloud
environments that includes development tools, runtime, and administration and
management tools and services, PaaS combines an application platform with
managed cloud infrastructure services. |
| Platform business |
A business that makes money from services delivered via apps and APIs on a scalable technical foundation that customers and suppliers integrate into their operations, incorporate into their offerings, and extend through their contributions. |
| Portal infrastructure |
Portal foundations. These include application servers,
enterprise applications, or integration servers, as well as remote access,
single sign-on, search, classification, and business intelligence. And, since
most organizations will have multiple portals, one must decide whether a
single portal infrastructure will be appropriate for all portals. |
| Prediction markets for
research purposes |
A platform that collects and aggregates the knowledge and
judgment of a group of consumers around a specific event or concept for the
purpose of making predictions. The predictions are then used to clarify or
confirm the direction of the research in bringing to market the products and
services that will resonate the most with consumers. |
| Predictive analytics |
Techniques, tools, and technologies that use data to find
models — models that can anticipate outcomes with a significant probability
of accuracy. |
| Predictive apps |
Apps that leverage big data predictive analytics to
anticipate and provide the right functionality and content on the right
device at the right time for the right person by continuously learning about
them. |
| Prescriptive analytics |
A combination of analytics, math, experiments, simulation,
and/or artificial intelligence used to improve the effectiveness of decisions
made by humans or by decision logic embedded in applications. |
| Prescriptive low-code platforms |
Prescriptive low-code platforms allow AD&D pros (and sometimes businesspeople) to configure and compose Lego-like blocks of business functionality to create and deliver bespoke enterprise applications. |
| Price stabilization |
A contractual guarantee by a service provider to a
customer that the provider will not increase prices for services provided
under a service contract, with the exception of passthrough charges such as
local circuits provisioned via a third party on the customer's behalf. |
| Pricing and promotion solutions |
Applications that systematically manage price appeals and concessions to drive long-term customer value. In B2C markets these applications manage and monitor prices and promotions to increase customer lifetime value, and in B2B markets they propagate the correct prices to each channel and location. |
| Private cloud |
Cloud infrastructure that is provisioned for exclusive use
by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business
units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, third
party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on- or off-premises. |
| Private community |
An invitation-only platform exclusively used for research
purposes to understand overall consumer behavior, objectively evaluate parts
of the customer experience, and conduct co-creation exercises. |
| Privileged identity management providers |
Enterprise technologies that employ hardened security measures to safeguard the access, authorization rights, and session activity of the people, applications, and processes with root-level (privileged) access to make changes to critical systems and sensitive data. |
| Process data governance |
The coordination of data and process governance to ensure
that data management priorities focus on the most critical business processes
and decisions and that business process improvement efforts accept
accountability for data quality. |
| Process governance |
The process for outlining the rules and standards for
selecting, prioritizing, and delivering process improvement across the
enterprise. |
| Process mining and documentation solutions |
Platforms that analyze processes based on output from line-of-business system event logs, real-time system data, client-side clicks, and keyboard user activity. They also provide visualization and analysis tools for process and business analysts to identify areas for process improvement. A complementary and increasingly integrated capability is process documentation, which allows collaborative documentation of as-is processes as well as platforms to define and drive consensus for future-state processes. |
| Product APIs |
APIs designed to directly control a product (whether it is
a physical product, digital product, or service) or facilitate its
integration into an ecosystem of related products. |
| Product information distribution services |
Systems that distribute product information to endpoints (retail, marketplace, marketing, etc.). These systems manage both connections to the endpoints and the requirements of the endpoints. |
| Product information management |
The processes and tools for managing product information, including: 1) data centralization and governance; 2) data onboarding from partners; 3) data and content creation and enrichment; and 4) content distribution/syndication. |
| Product lifecycle management |
Applications that systematically manage analytics and data visualization capabilities that accelerate the three main phases of the product lifecycle: ideation (innovation management), realization (process planning, project management, and manufacturing), and utilization (customer feedback, service information, and product usage data). |
| Product lifecycle management for discrete manufacturing |
Applications or platforms that enable an enterprise or a network of enterprises to collaborate on specifying, designing, testing, manufacturing, and operating discretely manufactured assets or products. |
| Product localization |
The process of adapting products and services for a
specific region by adding locale-specific components and translating
end-user-facing interfaces and documentation. |
| Product security |
Product security is the expansion of your security program to accelerate the development of, and protect revenue for, a firm's transformational products and services. |
| Professional services
industry |
Includes legal services, accounting services, consulting
services, outsourcing services, architectural services, scientific research
services, marketing research services, real estate services, and
administrative and support services (such as temporary worker services). |
| Programmatic product placement |
Fueled with state-of-art computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning technologies, programmatic product placement generates lifelike digital products and embeds them into existing video content according to brands' advertising strategies and viewer interests. |
| Programmatic selling |
The use of digital platforms to automate the targeting,
aggregation, booking, flighting, analysis, and optimization of online
publishers' advertising inventory via sell-side software interfaces and
algorithms, with the goal of improving yield. While it includes exchanges
based on real-time bidding, it also supports traditional selling methods and
workflows. |
| Project business automation solutions |
Technology that helps professional services and consulting organizations automate full-scale project and service delivery including pipeline management, resource planning, customer collaboration, project delivery, and project financial management to help them deliver successful projects, which enables them to grow their business. |
| Project management tool |
A secure, web-based project management solution that helps
track and monitor activities throughout the M&A process. Often, the tools
are not used solely for M&A but also for other inorganic growth
activities, such as divestures, carveouts, and joint ventures. |
| Promotion influencers |
Consumers who subscribe to promotional emails and are the
go-tos among their communities for recommendations on retail deals. |
| Pseudonymization |
A method of de-identification that replaces personally identifiable information with false identifiers, which facilitates data analysis while maintaining strong data protection. |
| Public cloud development platform |
A method of de-identification that replaces personally identifiable information with false identifiers, which facilitates data analysis while maintaining strong data protection. |
| Public community |
A public arena in which consumers can connect with brands
and people. |
| Publishers |
Individuals and organizations whose business is to create
and distribute content. Publishers own the rights to their content and can
assign those rights as they see fit. |
| Q |
| QR code |
A matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by
Japanese corporation Denso Wave in 1994. QR is derived from "quick
response," as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be
decoded at high speed. |
| R |
| Radioactive data |
Intellectual property plus personal data subject to
regulation. |
| Real-time interaction
management |
Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually
relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the
customer lifecycle via preferred customer touchpoints. |
| Recovery readiness view |
A dynamic real-time dashboard that offers instant
visibility into the state of recovery and highlights the technology elements
that are ready for recovery and those that are not, with remediation
recommendations. |
| Recurring customer and billing management solution |
A platform that determines what the value is that a customer owes for a delivered and/or ongoing product or service, which customer is responsible for paying, as well as when payment is due and by which payment method. |
| RegTech |
Specialized software that supplies AI and ML to keep up with reporting and continuous monitoring of specific compliance requirements across regulatory regimes. |
| Release management |
The process of planning, scheduling and controlling the
movement of releases to test and live environments to ensure that the
integrity of the live environment is protected and that the correct
components are released. |
| Reservations systems |
Software designed for businesses in the travel and leisure
market, including airlines, hotels, consolidators, tour operators, and
corporate travel departments. Features include booking, inventory management,
waitlisting and overbooking management, price control management, commission
tracking, forms creation, and many aspects of accounting. |
| Responsible AI solutions |
Tools, platforms, or frameworks that help ensure explainability, fairness, and accountability in AI systems. |
| Retail associate enablement tools |
A set of tools, software, or capabilities that enhances, automates, improves, or simplifies an in-store associate's workflow and communication when executing tasks related to retail store operational excellence or retail customer experience. |
| Retail media |
Digital ad placements on e-commerce websites bought by consumer goods brands to influence the customer at point of purchase. |
| Retail media solutions |
Technology or services offerings that help retailers build a media network to monetize their e-commerce sites and first-party data and/or help brands buy media from retail media networks and leverage retailer first-party data. |
| Retail planning applications |
Applications that apply the best mix of data, analytics, machine learning, AI, and human intuition to anticipate customer demand and create compelling assortments and campaigns. They also connect to sourcing and logistics to continuously synchronize inventory availability by channel and location with demand. |
| Retail technologies |
Retail technologies include point-of-sale, inventory and
merchandise management, digital signage, and loss prevention systems. |
| Return on marketing
investment |
A financial metric that calculates the total return
generated from marketing investment. |
| Risk appetite |
The amount of risk an organization will accept in pursuit
of its objectives. It is influenced by the organization's capacity to absorb
loss (e.g., of revenues or reputation) and by the culture's propensity for
taking risks (e.g., risk-averse versus risk-taking). Positive correlation
means a firm with a culture of aggressive risk taking should be prepared to
absorb greater losses. |
| Risk tolerance |
The amount of deviation from the level of risk defined by
the risk appetite that a firm will accept in a specific situation. Risk
tolerance should be defined using metrics that are linked to strategic
objectives in support of business objectives. |
| Robo-advice |
Software solutions that automate parts of the financial advice value chain, stretching from algorithms that deliver a custom asset allocation or assign customers to a model portfolio all the way to delivering regulated financial advice on the best retirement strategy and product mix. |
| Robotic process automation |
A collection of software tools and processes that: 1) mimic and integrate human actions with digital systems; 2) connect and manage diverse automations, including pragmatic AI components; and 3) support governance and operating models to scale automations, including auditing and monitoring digital workers. |
| Robotics quotient |
RQ measures the ability of individuals and organizations
to learn from, adapt to, collaborate with, trust, and generate business
results from automated entities, including software like RPA, AI, physical
robotics, and related systems. |
| RQ for blockchain |
RQ for blockchain measures the ability of individuals and organizations to work collaboratively with each other as well as with other companies in their ecosystems and value chains to design and run shared systems and processes, leveraging technologies that support new trust models. |
| Rugged DevOps |
A method that includes security practices as early in the
continuous delivery pipeline as possible to increase cybersecurity, speed,
and quality of releases beyond what DevOps practices can yield alone. |
| S |
| SaaS marketplaces |
Online spaces where SaaS buyers can discover SaaS applications, components and services. Leading SaaS marketplaces provide the ability to trial, purchase, negotiate contract terms, manage, expand subscriptions, and renew. |
| Sales coaching |
The iterative and collaborative process of accelerating
salesperson performance by creating lasting behavior change through
one-on-one conversations that are relevant, developmental, and motivational. |
| Sales enablement |
A strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing
employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable
conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the
customer's problem-solving lifecycle to optimize the return on investment of
the selling system. |
| Sales enablement automation |
Tools and technology that help sellers work in a more coordinated, customer-relevant manner to increase revenue lift, minimize the costs associated with sales, and deliver more meaningful experiences to buyers. |
| Sales force automation |
An integrated suite of customer relationship management
(CRM) tools to streamline and automate core sales processes around activity
tracking, opportunity and lead management, territory and quota management,
sales forecasting, and performance monitoring. |
| Salesforce consulting partners |
Services providers that can help Salesforce customers successfully transform their business using Salesforce technology. Key services include strategy, design, consulting, implementation, training and enablement, change management, and support. |
| Sales performance management solutions |
Automated solutions that help optimize incentive compensation, territory coverage, and quota assignment for direct and indirect sellers. These solutions enhance collaboration among stakeholders, increase sellers' motivation, and provide business leaders with a systematic way to operationalize their company's sales strategies. |
| Sales training and services |
Services that help businesses increase the effectiveness of their sales force and better align sales execution to strategic business goals. Leveraging their proprietary methodologies, sales training and services providers improve and reinforce skills, collaboration, coaching, and other critical sales processes. |
| Scenario design |
An approach to creating seamless cross-channel experiences
based on an understanding of customers, their goals, and their behaviors. |
| SD-WAN services |
Managed services associated with implementing SD-WAN products. They may be offered in conjunction with other network services, managed security services, and WAN optimization in a comanaged or fully managed model. |
| Search engine optimization technologies |
Tools used by marketers to automate critical tasks for search engine optimization (SEO), such as: project management, keyword research, website auditing, competitive intelligence, and content recommendations. |
| Security analytics
platform |
A platform built on big data infrastructure to converge
logging, correlating, and reporting feeds from security information
management, security solutions, network flow data, external threat
intelligence, and endpoints and applications. It uses this and machine
learning for real-time monitoring and to facilitate rapid incident detection,
analysis, and response. |
| Security architect |
The organization's technical authority on information
security architecture. Ensures that business solution design meets security
and compliance mandates and partners with stakeholders acorss the
organization to fulfill the functional requirements of business initiatives
in a secure fashion. |
| Security automation and
orchestration |
Technology products that provide automated, coordinated,
and policy-based action of security processes across multiple technologies,
making security operations faster, less error-prone, and more efficient. |
| Security awareness and training market |
Solutions that: 1) educate and prepare the workforce to protect their organization against targeted cyberattacks; 2) promote basic security hygiene; and 3) build a positive security culture. The solutions can range from technical and traditional eLearning and phishing simulations to multimodal progressive training methods utilizing virtual reality and microlearning. They provide education for a range of security topics, including social engineering, phishing, and personal cybersafety. |
| Security user behavior
analytics (SUBA) |
Functionality that helps build a unified view of users'
actions across the network. SUBA collects and correlates information on user
activity from logs and other data sources to heuristically and automatically
set a user activity baseline; it can then detect, risk score, prioritize,
intercept, and enable the investigation of anomalous behavior in real time. |
| Sensitive data discovery and classification |
The capability to provide visibility into where sensitive data is located, identify what this sensitive data is and why it's considered sensitive, and tag or label this data based on its level of sensitivity. |
| Sensors |
Real-time data collectors that measure one or more
physical properties of the person, place, or thing without an explicit action
or input from a human. |
| Sentiment analysis |
The automated classification of online commentary as
positive, neutral, or negative that is performed to understand the author's
feelings and attitudes about a topic. |
| Serverless computing |
An approach to software development that abstracts developers from underlying cloud infrastructure. Serverless architecture supports the deployment of arbitrary business logic, decouples state from underlying compute, automatically scales on demand, and supports event-driven communication. |
| Service design |
A design method that helps multidisciplinary teams build or improve intangible services by: 1) taking the customer’s perspective; 2) including all stakeholders; 3) visualizing the service as a sequence of actions; 4) using physical artefacts to represent even intangible services; and 5) factoring in all of the service’s environment. |
| Service orchestration |
The automation and provisioning of network services to
create the best user experience. |
| Services market for next-generation Oracle applications |
Services for next-generation Oracle applications align with Oracle's cloud products, focused on increased business agility and improved customer experience (CX). These services span beyond application maintenance and support, and include experience design, consulting, and implementation of newer Oracle Cloud products. |
| Services procurement software |
Software to help companies choose the contingent workers or services providers appropriate for a task, review and manage the credentials of these workers or providers, bring them onto and off of corporate facilities, and track and record their performance for accurate billing and payment. |
| Shared finances |
Any situation in which a person acts as an observer of, partner in, or proxy for another person's finances. |
| Signature moments |
Memorably crafted and branded microinteractions that deliver delight and value to customers in an often subtle yet definitively recognizable way. |
| Smart city |
A "city" that uses information and
communications technologies to make the critical infrastructure components
and services of a city — administration, education, healthcare, public
safety, real estate, transportation, and utilities — more aware, interactive,
and efficient. |
| Smart computing |
A new generation of hardware, software, and network
technologies that provide IT systems with real-time awareness of the real
world and advanced analytics, mobile reach, and collaboration platforms to
help people make more intelligent decisions and create alternatives and
actions that will optimize business processes and business balance sheet
results. |
| Smart grid |
The digitization of the power infrastructure; it
encompasses everything from bulk generation to transmission, distribution,
customers, operations, markets, and service providers. It's an intelligent
energy supply chain that spans utilities and consumers. |
| Social business |
An organization that removes barriers between individuals
and information while making it easy for people to find and engage others who
can help them solve customer and business problems. |
| Social co-creation |
Using social media and social technologies to involve
consumers directly and/or repeatedly in the product development process. |
| Social CRM |
The strategy, technology, business rules, workflows,
processes and social characteristics that a company implements to respond to
the customer's ownership of the conversation. |
| Social customer care |
Proactive care includes responding to brand mentions and
beyond with the goal of identifying opportunities to surprise and delight
customers within social media. Reactive care (traditional customer service)
encompasses any response to a customer-initiated transaction or service
inquiry within social media. |
| Social depth platforms |
Technologies that add social content and interactions
(e.g., blogs, ratings and reviews, user-generated content, forums, online
communities) to branded websites to drive exploration of products and
services. |
| Social engagement |
The process of interacting with consumers by responding to
their social media postings, with the intent of answering questions,
addressing problems, activating influencers, and gathering insights. |
| Social innovation network |
An ecosystem that uses social technologies to enable
employees to innovate and collaborate, furthering the firm's ability to meet
its goals in response to empowered customers. |
| Social intelligence |
The management and analysis of customer data from social
sources, used to activate, measure, and recalibrate marketing and business
programs. |
| Social investing |
Community-based, social-influenced investing that lets
investors follow or copy the strategies of other investors and discuss
investing ideas and strategies in forums with fellow investors. |
| Social listening |
An ongoing, engaged process of tracking, identifying, and
analyzing online conversations with the intent to understand consumer opinion
on topics, engage with consumers, and uncover insights for the betterment of
the business. |
| Social listening platforms |
Social listening platforms manage and analyze customer data from social sources and use that data to activate, measure, and recalibrate marketing and business programs. |
| Social loyalty |
Brand affinity built on the connection of customers to the
brand itself as well as to each other. |
| Social marketing |
The use of social tactics, media, tools, and technologies
across all components of the marketing mix: product, price, promotion, and
placement. |
| Social media management
solutions |
Solutions that help marketers publish, monitor, and
respond to customer posts on social networks. |
| Social media monitoring |
The passive observation of social data, including
tracking, identifying, and analyzing online conversations with the intent to
understand consumer opinion on topics. |
| Social suites |
Social platforms that combine multiple social tech capabilities into a single unified suite offering, such as social listening, customer response, organic publishing, advertising, influencer marketing, employee advocacy, ratings and reviews management, user-generated content management, and/or social communities. |
| Social Technographics |
A method of benchmarking consumers by their level of
participation in social computing behaviors. |
| Software as a service |
A standardized software capability delivered via
internet-standard technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way. |
| Software composition analysis |
Products that scan an application (without executing it) to identify vulnerabilities and conflicts in open source and third-party components, guiding users on where and how to remediate these flaws. |
| Software-defined data
center |
An abstraction model that defines a complete data center
by means of a layer of software that presents the resources of the data
center as pools of virtual and physical resources. The SDDC also allows them
to be composed into arbitrary user-defined services and managed across a
physically distributed environment as required. |
| Software-defined storage |
A storage architecture that pools new and existing storage
resources and allows developers and other business stakeholders to access
them without administrator intervention via APIs or service catalogs. |
| Software innovation |
Delivering software that transforms or improves a business
process, creates or improves a market offering, or enables or improves a
business model in a way that boosts value and impact for the enterprise,
customers, or partners. |
| Software quality |
Software that meets business requirements, provides a
satisfying user experience, and has fewer defects. |
| Solution accelerator |
A software asset that an IT services vendor uses to
automate a particular business or aspect of product development for clients.
It provides 30% to 90% of the solution that the client is looking for; the
provider reuses it across multiple engagements. |
| Solution governance |
The mechanisms and processes by which an organization
directs or controls aspects of its technology investments; includes strategy
and functional requirements. |
| Sourcing and vendor
management office |
The next-generation organizational structure for SVM
practices. The primary differentiator is the ability to act as a federated
entity to source solutions and manage vendors holistically across the
sourcing lifecycle. The SVMO's focus is characterized by an amplified
forward-looking, networked-business demand and business-value-led approach. |
| Specialty designer |
A services firm that helps companies apply expert design
practices to a narrow business goal or a specific technology. |
| Speed of the customer |
The speed at which business must operate to satisfy
customers' need for immediate information, product, or service delivery. This
speed will vary by industry and by engagement but must be as near to real
time as possible as timing becomes increasingly critical to an enhanced
customer experience. |
| Spend analytics |
Spend analytics products support the loading of spend data (invoices, POs, etc.); cleansing and normalizing of spend data; classification into spend categories; identification of savings opportunities and contract leakage; and reports and analysis on past and future spending. |
| SQL-for-Hadoop solutions |
Software that allows users or applications to work with
Hadoop data using structured query language (SQL) that is nearly or fully
compliant with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). |
| Statement of work |
A document that outlines the scope of a limited piece of
project work and that covers the following aspects: the purpose of the
project; the work that must be done in detail and the hardware and software
involved; the location of the work to be done; a schedule of deliverables;
quality thresholds; any special requirements; and the payment schedule. |
| Static application security testing |
Tools that test and evaluate an application's proprietary code by examining the code or binary without executing the application. These products analyze the application or source code directly, detecting where in the code security weaknesses exist. |
| Strategic porfolio management for agile organizations |
Technologies that automate the translation of enterprise strategic plans into product and service plans that bring actual business value through the prioritization and delivery of work initiatives. SPM acts as the analysis and communication vehicle for the entire organization. |
| Streaming analytics
platform |
Software that can filter, aggregate, enrich, and analyze a
high throughput of data from multiple disparate live data sources and in any
data format to identify simple and complex patterns to visualize business in
real time, detect urgent situations, and automate immediate actions. |
| Streaming data platform |
Enterprise software that connects to multiple, disparate live data sources (streaming data) to expose and/or deliver to subscribing applications, analyze to gain real-time insights, and/or recombine for continuous integration to downstream data repositories or applications. |
| Strong authentication |
The use of multiple credentials or "factors" for
proving a person's identity. |
| Supplier performance
management |
Monitoring and remediating the performance of a supplier.
This includes comparing the service quality to industry standards and making
sure that the performance meets the expectations defined in the contract. |
| Supplier risk and performance management |
Software that aggregates static, transactional, and unstructured data about suppliers and manages both initial risk assessment and ongoing relationship management. |
| Supplier value management |
SRPM products support supplier master data management; internal supplier data collection and presentation, including employee satisfaction surveys and rating; external supplier financial data, social responsibility rating, diversity ratings, and other risk information; and supplier qualification data for potential suppliers. |
| Supply chain control towers |
Applications or platforms that enable a single company or a network of companies to plan and adaptively execute fulfilment of anticipated demand. |
| Surveillance economy |
A new form of information capitalism that aims to predict and modify human behavior in order to increase revenue and market control. |
| Sustainable finance |
The inclusion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria in business or investment decisions for the long-lasting benefit of clients, partners, stakeholders, and society at large. |
| Switching fabric |
A combination of hardware and software that is a subset of businesswide networking fabric, using switching to connect applications, data, users, and devices to the right resource, based on business policies. |
| Systemic risk |
A risk that is based on externalities but is highly connected and interdependent with enterprise risks. Systemic risk events will cause a cascade of adjacent industry failures or a breakdown of a system rather than an impact to an aspect of a system. Because of the effects of these events, a failure to properly respond to them will represent a relevant impact to customers and shareholders. |
| System of engagement |
A system that empowers customers, partners, and employees
with context-rich apps and smart products to help them decide and act
immediately in moments of need. |
| System of insight |
An operating model (people, process, and technology) that continuously improves a business outcome by connecting data, qualitative and quantitative insight, and software-driven action in a closed loop. |
| Systems availability |
The ratio between MTBF (mean time between failures) and
MTTR (mean time to repair). |
| T |
| Tech governance |
The policies, frameworks, and processes that facilitate
the funding and resource allocation, risk management, and measurement
necessary to deliver effective tech strategies. |
| Technographics® |
A survey and segmentation that analyzes consumers by the
motivations, attitudes, and income they bring to the adoption and use of
technology. Technographics is a registered trademark of Forrester Research,
Inc. |
| Technology business
management |
The adoption of tools and processes to shift the
management of technology costs to technology value, enabling and supporting
the acceleration of the business technology agenda. |
| Technology-driven innovation |
An advanced discipline of rapid technology experimentation that applies rigor, resources, and customer insight to find, prepare for, and commercialize disruptive, technology-fueled change. |
| Technology-guided business strategy |
A way of strategic decision-making that projects the impact of technology change on customers and markets and invests to get ahead through emerging technology. |
| Technology innovation chain |
A series of related technologies that build upon one another synergistically to create breakthrough opportunities. |
| Test data generation |
The process of generating fictitious business data based
on defined requirements to aid in application development and testing. |
| Text analytics |
A subset of natural language processing (NLP) technologies that identifies structures and patterns in text and transforms them into actionable insights to drive better business outcomes. |
| Third-party risk management technology |
Platforms that identify, assess, score, monitor, and report on risks to the organization stemming from their third-party relationships. They support analysis, treatment, and workflow for risk mitigation at every stage of the third-party lifecycle including: 1) sourcing/procurement; 2) due diligence; 3) selection; 4) onboarding; 5) ongoing risk monitoring; and 6) termination/offboarding. |
| Threat intelligence |
Assessments of the intent, capabilities, and opportunities of threat actors in response to stakeholder requirements. Threat intelligence is used to inform business decisions and reduce risk from physical and cyberthreats. |
| Three word-of-mouth
marketing types |
Customer advocacy, employee advocacy, and category
influencer. |
| Through-channel marketing
automation |
A distributed marketing system that enterprise marketers
use to enable and scale local marketing program execution through channel
partners (stores, agents, dealers, franchisees, distributors, and resellers)
with governance to protect brand integrity. |
| Total Economic Impact |
A methodology used to analyze and support IT decisions; it
embraces traditional cost analysis and a best-practice approach to minimizing
costs and extends it by explicitly incorporating analysis and quantification
of both business benefits and flexibility, while tempering these three
categories with an analysis of the risk effects. |
| Toxic data |
Personal financial information, personal healthcare
information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), and
intellectual property (IP). |
| Trade promotion management |
Applications and services that secure the best ROI in terms of revenue and market share for promotional tactics, including investments in store tactics like endcaps, facings, and adjacencies; in inserts or circulars; or in deals like buy-one, get-one-free sales. These solutions close the loop with the supply chain by accurately forecasting the uplift for each combination of promotional tactics. They also close the loop with finance, accounting for the cost of each tactic based on its anticipated uplift, validating and settling claims from retailers, and reversing the accrual to promotional expenses. |
| Transform analytics |
A subset of content analytics that converts unstructured
information such as spreadsheets to XML and other data forms. |
| Transformative innovation |
Innovation aimed at changing the challenge. Transformative
innovation aims at changing the problem by shifting perspectives and
transforming your innovation culture for the digital reality. Transformative
innovation is about fundamental change. |
| Transformative investments |
Investments aimed at fundamental business process and business model change — not incremental improvements. |
| Translytical data platform |
A unified database that supports transactional, operational, analytical, and streaming workloads in real time, ensuring data consistency, transactional integrity, and analytical accuracy with extreme performance and scale achieved through modern memory architectures. |
| U |
| Ultra modular computing |
The radical adoption of modular principles based on using
commodity components (from hardware through all levels of infrastructure
software) in a standardized architecture in order to simplify the environment
for creating, delivering, and operating applications within an enterprise. |
| Unattended RPA |
Automation that replaces a complete human function in a lights-out, batch-oriented manner; creates a virtual workforce; and, generally, associates with back-office activities.
|
| Unified endpoint management |
Products that provide a centralized policy engine for managing and securing employee laptops and mobile devices from a single console. |
| Unified marketing impact
analytics |
A blend of statistical techniques that assigns business
value to each element of the marketing mix at both a strategic and tactical
level. |
| Unified marketing measurement |
Unified marketing measurement uses statistical approaches to enable a holistic understanding of the business impact of a marketer's entire marketing mix, including digital and offline channels, at both strategic and tactical performance levels. |
| Usability testing |
The process of assessing the usability of a product or service by: 1) having a sample of its target audience try it; 2) recording their responses — including either their interactions, their self-reported reactions, or both; and 3) analyzing the findings. |
| User experience (UX) |
Customers’ perceptions of their interactions with a product, service, or system. |
| User-generated content |
Video, image, or written content created by individuals
without contractual obligation and published or posted for consumption by a
general population or community. |
| User interface |
The elements of a device, appliance, vehicle, or other product or system designed for users to interact with. |
| V |
| Value-added resellers |
Suppliers that sell original equipment manufacturers'
hardware, software, or networking equipment and also offer additional
services for those products. Examples of additional services include
implementation, consulting, and continuous support. |
| Values-based consumers |
Consumers who evaluate their purchases not just in terms
of the direct benefits they'll receive but also in context of the product's,
brand's, or company's values around employment and manufacturing practices,
political and social stances, and commitment to other causes or beliefs. |
| Value stream management |
A combination of people, process, and technology that maps, optimizes, visualizes, measures, and governs business value flow (including epics, stories, and work items) through heterogeneous enterprise software delivery pipelines. VSM tools are the technology enabling the practices of VSM. |
| Value stream management tools |
Tools that enable users to map, visualize, and govern business value flow (including epics, stories, and work items) through heterogeneous enterprise software delivery pipelines. |
| Vendor viability |
The likelihood that a vendor will be a capable long-term
supplier to the firm, based on its own risk factors and the client's
tolerance for the supplier's risk. |
| Virtual care |
Clinician-patient interactions that take place via phone, video, or a secure message platform. A clinician (e.g., MD, NP) is available to evaluate patients and confirm diagnoses. Also called telehealth or telemedicine. |
| Virtual network
infrastructure |
VNI uses virtualized and physical infrastructure; acts as
a vertically integrated Layer 2 to Layer 7 module within the infrastructure;
creates a fabric of horizontally interwoven networking components; automates
and orchestrates infrastructure to deliver the right services to each user;
and permits workload management by business units. |
| Virtual reality (VR) |
An occluded-view, immersive digital experience made to feel realistic by the addition of body cues like 360-degree views, 3D sound, and, increasingly, several degrees of physical freedom for movement. |
| Voice of the customer
program |
A systematic approach for collecting customer feedback and data, mining that data for insights, and then incorporating the insights into business decisions. |
| Voice of the employee |
Any feedback from employees or partners that pertains to
their ability to deliver great customer experiences. |
| Voice user interface |
A company's signature for its voice application platform.
It supports a unique identification, has specialized characteristics, and is
easily recognizable. The VUI addresses the flow of communications and adds
personality to the event so a caller listens to a voice that matches the type
of business they are calling. |
| W |
| Warehouse management
systems |
Applications and services that track and coordinate the movement and storage of goods and material, including inbound truckload scheduling and unit-of-measure receiving, dock-to-stock inspection and routing, guided put-away, and optimized picking. |
| Web application firewalls |
Tools that examine input to and responses from web applications and APIs to detect and block exploits or attack attempts, and to enforce security policies based on attack signatures, protocol standards, and anomalous detection. |
| Web content management system |
A solution for creating content via authoring, development, and collaborative workflows; managing content metadata and code component libraries; and delivering contextual experiences for customer and partner engagement on websites and other digital touchpoints. |
| Website governance |
The establishment of policies, processes, ownership, and
compliance for interacting with a website. Governance areas include content,
navigation, design, access and permissions, copyrights and trademarks,
archives and library, home pages, feedback, funding, linking, security, and
site management. |
| Work orchestration tools |
Software tools that, from one place, find, create, configure, manage, and coordinate AI components supporting digital workers and humans. |
| X |
| Y |
| Z |
| Zero-party data |
Data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand. It can include preference center data, purchase intentions, personal context, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize her. |
| Zero Trust edge |
A Zero Trust edge solution securely connects and transports traffic, using Zero Trust access principles, in and out of remote sites leveraging mostly cloud-based security and networking services. |
| Zero Trust solution providers |
Technologies that enable a Zero Trust strategy through a cohesive combination of best-of-breed and platform solutions that deliver a variety of capabilities across the pillars of the ZTX framework, including data security, workload security, network security, user security, device security, automation and orchestration, and visibility and analytics. |
GLOSSARY