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how well the vendor’s product can meet the organization’s semistructured decisions Decisions in which only part of the
specific requirements. problem has a clear-cut answer provided by an accepted
responsibility Accepting the potential costs, duties, and obligations procedure.
for the decisions one makes. senior management People occupying the topmost hierarchy in
responsive Web design Ability of a Web site to automatically an organization who are responsible for making long-range
change screen resolution and image size as a user switches to decisions.
devices of different sizes, such as a laptop, tablet computer, or sensitivity analysis Models that ask “what-if” questions repeatedly
smartphone. Eliminates the need for separate design and to determine the impact of changes in one or more factors on the
development work for each new device. outcomes.
revenue model A description of how a firm will earn revenue, sentiment analysis Mining text comments in an e-mail message,
generate profits, and produce a return on investment. blog, social media conversation, or survey form to detect
richness Measurement of the depth and detail of information that a favorable and unfavorable opinions about specific subjects.
business can supply to the customer as well as information the server Computer specifically optimized to provide software and
business collects about the customer. other resources to other computers over a network.
risk assessment Determining the potential frequency of the service level agreement (SLA) Formal contract between
occurrence of a problem and the potential damage if the customers and their service providers that defines the specific
problem were to occur. Used to determine the cost/benefit of a responsibilities of the service provider and the level of service
control. expected by the customer.
Risk Aversion Principle Principle that one should take the action service-oriented architecture Software architecture of a firm
that produces the least harm or incurs the least cost. built on a collection of software programs that communicate with
router Specialized communications processor that forwards packets each other to perform assigned tasks to create a working software
of data from one network to another network. application
routines Precise rules, procedures and practices that have been shopping bot Software with varying levels of built-in intelligence to
developed to cope with expected situations. help electronic commerce shoppers locate and evaluate products
RSS Technology using aggregator software to pull content from Web or service they might wish to purchase.
sites and feed it automatically to subscribers’ computers. six sigma A specific measure of quality, representing 3.4 defects
per million opportunities; used to designate a set of
SaaS (Software as a Service) Services for delivering and methodologies and techniques for improving quality and
providing access to software remotely as a Web-based service. reducing costs.
safe harbor Private self-regulating policy and enforcement smart card A credit-card-size plastic card that stores digital
mechanism that meets the objectives of government regulations information and that can be used for electronic payments in
but does not involve government regulation or enforcement. place of cash.
sales revenue model Selling goods, information, or services to smartphone Wireless phone with voice, text, and Internet
customers as the main source of revenue for a company. capabilities.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act Law passed in 2002 that imposes sniffer Type of eavesdropping program that monitors information
responsibility on companies and their management to protect traveling over a network.
investors by safeguarding the accuracy and integrity of financial social bookmarking Capability for users to save their bookmarks
information that is used internally and released externally. to Web pages on a public Web site and tag these bookmarks with
scalability The ability of a computer, product, or system to expand keywords to organize documents and share information with
to serve a larger number of users without breaking down. others.
scope Defines what work is and is not included in a project. social business Use of social networking platforms, including
scoring model A quick method for deciding among alternative Facebook, Twitter, and internal corporate social tools, to engage
systems based on a system of ratings for selected objectives. employees, customers, and suppliers.
search costs The time and money spent locating a suitable product social CRM Tools enabling a business to link customer conversatins,
and determining the best price for that product. data, and relationships from social networking sites to CRM
search engine A tool for locating specific sites or information on processes.
the Internet. social engineering Tricking people into revealing their passwords
search engine marketing Use of search engines to deliver in their by pretending to rrbe legitimate users or members of a company
results sponsored links, for which advertisers have paid. in need of information.
search engine optimization (SEO) the process of changing a social graph Map of all significant online social relationships,
Web site's content, layout, and format in order to increase the comparable to a social network describing offline relationships.
ranking of the site on popular search engines, and to generate social networking sites Online community for expanding users’
more site visitors. business or social contacts by making connections through their
Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP) Protocol used mutual business or personal connections.
for encrypting data flowing over the Internet; limited to social search Effort to provide more relevant and trustworthy
individual messages. search results based on a person’s network of social contacts.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Enables client and server computers social shopping Use of Web sites featuring user-created Web pages
to manage encryption and decryption activities as they to share knowledge about items of interest to other shoppers.
communicate with each other during a secure Web session. sociotechnical design Design to produce information systems that
security Policies, procedures, and technical measures used to blend technical efficiency with sensitivity to organizational and
prevent unauthorized access, alteration, theft, or physical damage human needs.
to information systems. sociotechnical view Seeing systems as composed of both technical
security policy Statements ranking information risks, identifying and social elements.
acceptable security goals, and identifying the mechanisms for software-defined networking (SDN) Using a central control
achieving these goals. program separate from network devices to manage the flow of
Semantic Web Ways of making the Web more "intelligent," with data on a network.
machine-facilitated understanding of information so that searches software localization Process of converting software to operate in
can be more intuitive, effective, and executed using intelligent a second language.
software agents.

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