Block 3 Flashcards
Ensuring continuing success in IT systems
Adaptive life cycles (change-driven/agile methods)
Adaptive life cycles (also known as change-driven or agile methods) apply when scope is ill-defined at the outset. They are also iterative and incremental, but iterations are very rapid and are fixed in time and cost. Used in projects characterised by rapid change and require high levels of client/end user commitment and involvement.
Business Continuity Management
A management process that helps manage the risk to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring that it can operate to the extent required in the event of a disruption.
Business Impact Analysis
Considers all functions of the business unit and grade them for criticality across several impact categories.
business resilience
The expected overall outcome from Business Continuity Management processes of ICT Reediness for Business Continuity.
Delphi
Rounds of questions to anonymous panels of academics regarding their ideas for technological forecasting of what might be achieved and when over a given time. Answers are circulated among participants for review and reflection at each stage. No inter-panel communication is allowed.
digital divide
A term used to describe various IT-based differences in inequalities.
digital immigrants
Those who learned how to use IT in later life.
digital inequality
The power and relations between individuals or groups related to access to and the use of ICT’s.
digital natives
Those who grew up using and having access to IT.
discontinuities
Events or trends that make the world significantly different from the way things have been previously.
driving forces
Key factors in the environment of an organisation that have an impact on its future.
(It is quite possible to analyse driving forces in an hour or two within shorter methods. A common way of making sense of driving forces is to consider them using the STEEPLE categories.)
effective access
The difference between having access to ICT’s and being able to ‘use’ them to get things done.
environmental scanning
Making sense of the ‘systems’ environment in the context of technology forecasting.
global digital divide
Digital division between nations. Specifically, the developed world (Global North) and the developing world (Global South).
ICT Readiness for Business Continuity (IRBC)
Policies developed by organisations to ensure that any of their services provided by ICT systems are maintained in the event of disruption.
Information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D)
Refers to the use of ICT’s in the fields of socioeconomic development, international development and human rights, and aims to bridge the digital divide by assessing disadvantaged populations anywhere in the world, particularly developing countries.
insourcing
Reverse of out-sourcing: Bringing business processes previously handled by third parties into the enterprise itself.
Iterative (incremental) life cycles
Apply when there is less scope about project activities, and will go through multiple iterations (repetitions) as the understanding of the product, and functionality increases incrementally.
key uncertainties
The most crucial driving forces (or amalgams of driving forces) which can go in one direction or another. Identifying two key uncertainties as continuous scales, and making them axes of a two-dimensional graph and form four possible scenarios.
legacy systems
Existing systems in which changes are difficult due to insufficient flexibility.
local digital divide
Digital division with a country or specific region.
