Definition: An ANSI protocol that defines a set of standards for documents involved in electronic data interchange.

Overview

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) chartered an Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) in 1979 to develop a set of standards for the documents that are exchanged through Electronic data inter-change (EDI). The standard has periodically been revised by the ASC, with version 2 being established in 1986, version 3 in 1992, version 4 in 1997, and version 5 in 2004. The standard defines Transaction sets to capture the information that would be found in a paper document. For example, the X.12 transaction set 850 represents an outbound purchase order, 860 a purchase order change document, 855 a purchase order acknowledgement document, set 856 represents packing slips, and 810 represents invoices.

The X.12 standard breaks a transaction set into logical groups of data called Segments. For example, the 850 purchase order set could contain the following segments: a transaction set header, an initial segment, a reference number, a date/time reference, carrier details, name, product identifier, physical details of the item, marking/ packing/loading, destination quantity, and transaction totals. All segments for each transaction set are extensive because they have to be usable by many different organizations, and it is usual for only subsets of the defined segments to be utilized by each company. The segments are themselves composed of data items; thus the item “marking/packing/loading” could contain the fields item description type, packaging characteristic code, association qualifier code, and packaging description code.

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)

Definition: The Association for Computing Machinery was founded in 1947 to act as a professional organization focused upon the advancement of information-technology skills.

Overview

The ACM acts as a professional organization within the technology industry. The society provides a range of services, including professional development courses, scholarly journals, conferences, sponsorship of special interest groups (SIGs), and sponsorship of public awareness activities that pertain to technology, and to scientific and educational activities. The conferences, peer-reviewed publications, and SIGs provide high-quality forums for the interchange of information in the area of information technology. ACM provides an electronic portal through which a large digital library of technology-related information may be accessed, including academic and professional journals, conference proceedings, and a repository of algorithms.

Business value proposition

The ACM provides a range of resources that can assist technology professionals in developing their skills. These include continuing education programs, a high-quality database of technology literature, professional conferences, and networking events. The peer-reviewed literature includes an extensive library of algorithms allowing technology professionals to use tested and proven algorithms rather than having to reinvent them. The ACM also provides ethical guidelines for its membership and monitors public policy issues in the area of technology and science. Access to the resources of the ACM provides an IT professional with a quick, effective, and efficient mechanism through which the continuously changing fields of computer science and information technologies can be monitored.

Foundation concepts: Network, Bandwidth.

Definition: T-Carrier is the generic name for digital high-speed data-transmission lines more specifically known in the United States as T-1, T-2, etc.

Overview

The basis of the T-Carrier system is the digital Channel, designated DS0 or T-0. A single DS0 channel has a capacity or Bandwidth of 64 kbps (64 000 bits per second), which is the amount of carrying capacity that Bell Labs originally defined as necessary to carry a digitized voice signal over their network. Originally, the name T-1 was used for a digital transmission channel with a bandwidth of 1544 kbps that carried 24 separate DS0 channels together with one 8 kbps channel for system-related information. Now the technology may be slightly different, and T-1 has become a less specific name for any 1544 kbps digital carrier. Similar names (T-2, T-3, etc.) are used for higher-bandwidth carriers:

1. a T-1 line is equivalent to 24 channels or 1.544 Mbps,

2. a T-2 line is equivalent to 96 channels or 6.312 Mbps,

3. a T-3 line is equivalent to 672 channels or 44.74 Mbps,

4. a T-4 line is equivalent to 4032 channels or 274.2 Mbps, and

5. a T-5 line is equivalent to 5760 channels or 400.3 Mbps.

although it is not common to hear of anything other than T-1 and T-3. In Japan, exactly the same system is used, except with the letter J instead of T. Originally T-lines were made of copper wire, and the designation FT was used for fiber optics, but now the distinction is often ignored.

Foundation concept: Networks.

Overview

The standard model for a voice telephone system is a circuit switching network. When two users or end-stations wish to communicate, a direct connection must be made between them, and dedicated to that call for its duration. The connection may be through copper wires, fiber-optic cables, or even radio or microwave transmissions. It may pass though any number of switching stations, staffed by human operators with plug-boards, or electronically operated. It is even possible, using frequency shifting, for many conversations to be carried by the same wire at the same time. The key concept is that a complete connection must be made, then the conversation can happen, and then the connection may be dismantled.

Circuit switching allows very simple telephony equipment built on nineteenth-century technology to operate effectively (the first telephone exchange was working in 1877), but it does not allow very efficient use of the high-cost infrastructure (long-distance cables and transmitters).

The alternative is a Packet-switching network, and requires that all communications are in digital form. In a packetswitched network, every end-station has a permanent connection to at least one switching station; each switching station has a number of permanent connections to other switching stations. The connectivity does not change during use: connections are not made before data is transmitted or broken thereafter; there is a path (perhaps a very long path, through dozens of switching stations) from any end-station to any other.

Foundation concept: Artificial intelligence.

Definition: Machine learning is the ability of programs to make inferences and expand their understanding of the domain in which they operate.

Overview

The term Machine learning is usually associated with automated learning or Self-programming capabilities rather than the production of solutions from static knowledge bases. Mechanisms for learning under current research include learning by knowledge acquisition, learning by examples, neural networks, case-based reasoning (CBR), genetic algorithms, and learning by discovery.

Knowledge acquisition is a vital component of machine learning and is the mechanism through which a system gathers knowledge, which then has to be represented internally to provide the basis for inference. Major challenges to researchers into machine learning lie in each part of this process: how to capture knowledge of different types (from pictures, speech, text, diagrams), how to represent each of these knowledge types, how to integrate them all, and, of course, how to infer useful new knowledge from old. In light of the multitude of different types of knowledge that systems need to acquire and be able to infer from, many techniques have been developed to assist in this process, including computational learning theory, explanation-based learning, delayed reinforcement learning, temporal difference learning, and using version spaces for learning.

One of the key problems still facing researchers is that of common sense reasoning; whereas a child having once touched a hot-plate can extrapolate that anything glowing red is potentially dangerous, this ability to generalize an experience is very difficult for programmers to build into computer systems, because every generalization is context dependent and thus variable in nature.

Foundation Concept: Bit.

Definition: The use of quantum mechanics, the laws governing sub-microscopic particles, in the construction of computing and communication devices.

Overview

Quantum computing is firmly in the domain of science fiction, and can be expected to stay there for quite some while. Very basic experiments confirming that the underlying ideas are at least viable have been performed successfully, but the construction of usable computing or communications devices is at best very distant. We are currently at a stage akin to having discovered that electricity does actually exist; people can start thinking about the possibility of building computers, but the possibility is far off, and it may never happen.

Quantum mechanics governs the behavior of very small particles, single atoms and smaller, and shows that they do not behave as experience of the larger world would lead us to expect. The two key concepts that might turn out to be practically useful are Superposition and Entanglement.

In conventional computing, a switch or logic element is either on or off, 1 or 0. Ten logic elements give ten things that can be on or off in any combination, resulting in 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 1024 different states. A search through 1024 possibilities is performed by stepping 10 such elements through all possible combinations of states in turn.

Definition: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was enacted to “protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws, and for other purposes” (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Report 107-610).

Overview

The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 was a response to the financial reporting and disclosure problems associated with companies such as Enron, whose 2001 collapse was the largest bankruptcy in US history. This large and complex act pertains to corporate governance practices in public companies and contains eleven titles:

1. Public company accounting oversight board

2. Auditor independence

3. Corporate responsibility

4. Enhanced financial disclosures

5. Analyst conflicts of interest

6. Commission resources and authority

7. Studies and reports

8. Corporate and criminal fraud accountability

9. White-collar crime penalty enhancements

10. Corporate tax returns

11. Corporate fraud and accountability

While the act is wide-reaching in scope and focuses on corporate and executive accountability for financial data, the maintenance of internal control structures, and the role of accounting firms in the audit process, for the CIO or IT professional it does not contain any specific systems requirements and in fact never even mentions the word computer in its 66 pages. However, it is clear that technology and information systems will be central to corporate compliance with the act.

The eleven titles of the act contain 69 sections, several of which are regarded as key from a CIO's perspective, including the following.

In writing this book, we have drawn upon our experiences as professors, consultants, and technologists to provide a resource for executives, students, and other readers who have a desire to achieve a rapid understanding of a technology, a computer-related process methodology, or a technology-related law.

The book provides not only the definitions for over 200 terms, but also a concise overview of the term, the associated business value proposition, and a summary of the positive and negative aspects of the technology or processes underlying the term.

The book addresses a problem faced by many executives working in the twenty-first century organization, that of understanding technology without needing to become a technologist. Today's executives use or are responsible for technology in nearly every aspect of their organization's operations; however, the pace of change in technology, the misinformation provided from informal sources, and general opaqueness of the terminology can be off-putting for executives and managers. In order to help executives overcome these problems, we have drawn upon over twenty years of teaching at the executive level and our backgrounds as technologists to provide clear, understandable descriptions for the most important technology and terminology in use within today's organizations.

The executives' need to understand technology is undeniable, but their role dictates that they must understand technology at two levels. Firstly, they must understand what the technology actually is, and this is addressed in our text by the provision of an overview section for each term.

Definition: e-Commerce/e-business are business models that utilize the internet as a mechanism through which companies, vendors, and customers interact.

Overview

e-Commerce originated with the deregulation of the internet in 1995. It was originally conceived as a business-to-customer (B2C) model of commerce, and corporations were formed to provide services and products over the internet without having any physical retail presence (e.g., Amazon.com, the well-known online book seller).

The term e-Business was coined by Lou Gerstner, then CEO of IBM, who looked beyond the B2C model to use the internet for delivering services and supporting physical business channels.

The start-up companies that adopted pure B2C commerce, for which there is no physical retail store, together with startup business-to-business (B2B) organizations, which also owned no physical retailing or warehousing capacity, aimed to “disintermediate” the established companies by having lower internal and distribution-channel costs. Unfortunately, this model proved to be very expensive to support as the businesses attempted to scale up and reach profitability, and the majority ran out of capital following the decline in the US stock market of 2000 and closed down. Those that survived the stock-market crash endured a market consolidation and continue to attempt to build market share, drive down costs, and become profitable or maintain profitability.