Glossary Topics F-J

Question 1

What is Federated Identity?

Answer 1

Federated Identity
Standards-based method of sharing and managing identity data and establishing single signon across security domains and organizations.

Question 2

What does FEWS stand for?

Answer 2

Acronym:
Front End Web Services.

Question 3

What is ‘File System Utilization’?

Answer 3

Allocated storage to which data has been written.

Question 4

Financial Accounting?

Answer 4

Financial Accounting
A field of accounting that treats money as a means of measuring economic performance instead of as a factor of production. It encompasses the entire system of monitoring and control of money as it flows in and out of an organization as assets and liabilities, and revenues and expenses.

Financial accounting gathers and summarizes financial data to prepare financial reports such as a balance sheet and an income statement for the organization’s management, investors, lenders, suppliers, tax authorities, and other stakeholders.

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/financialaccounting . html#ixzz28AbucnKd

Within the Apptio TBM Suite, financial accounting relates to IT Finance and IT Planning.

Question 5

What are Fixed Assets?

Answer 5

Fixed Assets
An asset that is not consumed or sold during the normal course of business, such as land, buildings, equipment, machinery, vehicles, leasehold improvements, and other such items.

Fixed assets enable their owner to carry on its operations. In accounting, fixed does not necessarily mean immovable; any asset expected to last, or be in use for, more than one year is considered a fixed asset. On a balance sheet, these assets are shown at their book value (purchase price less depreciation).

Several standard methods of computing depreciation expense may be used, including fixed percentage, straight line, and declining balance methods. Depreciation expense generally begins when the asset is placed in service.

Question 6

What is a Forecast?

Answer 6

Forecast
A process of estimating how much you expect to spend in a given period or for the remainder of a project. Forecasted amounts are generally added to actual expenses in order to determine any variance that is expected from your budget. Forecasts are shorter in length than a budget; they are “mini” budget updates within the fiscal budgeting cycle.

Question 7

What is a Formula?

Answer 7

Formula
In the Apptio applications, a formula is a line of code that inserts a calculated value into a table, metric, or model.

Question 8

What is a Function?

Answer 8

Function
A predefined procedure that inserts a calculated value into a table, metric, or model. A function takes input in the form of arguments, performs predefined processing, and returns a single value.

Question 9

What does G&A mean?

Answer 9

G&A
General and Administrative.

Question 10

What is GAAP?

Answer 10

GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Principles)
GAAP is a codification of how CPA firms and corporations prepare and present their business income and expense, assets and liabilities on their financial statements. GAAP is not a single accounting rule, but rather the aggregate of many rules on how to account for various transactions. It provides a common standard in presenting the financial status of a company.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires that US GAAP be followed in financial reporting by publicly traded companies.

GAAP is slowly being phased out in favour of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as global business becomes more pervasive. GAAP applies only to United States financial reporting and thus an American company reporting under GAAP might show different results if it was compared to a British company that uses the International Standards. While there is close similarity between GAAP and the international rules, the differences can lead a financial statement user to believe incorrectly that company A made more money than company B simply because they report using different rules.

Question 11

What is a General Ledger?

Answer 11

General Ledger
The general ledger or GL is the main accounting record of a business which uses double-entry bookkeeping (debits and credits). It will usually include accounts for such items as current assets, fixed assets, liabilities, revenue and expense items, gains and losses. The listing of the account names contained with the GL is called the chart of accounts (COA). The general ledger should include the date, description and balance or total amount for each account. (Wikipedia)

See also: Chart of Accounts.

Question 12

What is GIT?

Answer 12

Distributed version control and source code management (SCM) system. Free software distributed under GNU General Public License version 2.

Question 13

What is GITHUB?

Answer 13

A web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. Paid software.

Question 14

What are Green Dollars?

Answer 14

Green Dollars are real money leaving the company or coming into the company. This can be used to characterize cost savings for ROI studies.

Question 15

What is GTB?

Answer 15

GTB (Grow the Business)
Grow the Business. One of three categories for analysing IT investments from a portfolio view. GTB is about increasing revenues and profits from existing customer segments and product offerings. IT enables growth by providing capacity where and when it is needed to meet the company’s growth. It can also increase growth through new revenue streams based on new services and innovation.

Question 16

What is Hadoop?

Answer 16

Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is an open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications, licensed under the Apache v2 license. It supports running applications on large clusters of commodity hardware. Hadoop was derived from Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. The Hadoop framework transparently provides both reliability and data motion to applications.

Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named MapReduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or re-executed on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both map/reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework.

It enables applications to work with thousands of computation independent computers and petabytes of data. The entire Apache Hadoop “platform” is now commonly considered to consist of the Hadoop kernel, MapReduce and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), as well as a number of related projects – including Apache Hive, Apache HBase, and others. Hadoop is written in the Java programming language and is an Apache top-level project being built and used by a global community of contributors.

Question 17

What is HRM (Human Resource Management)?

Answer 17

HRM (Human Resource Management)
Human Resource Management is the strategic approach to the effective and efficient management of people in a company or organization such that they help their business gain a competitive advantage. It is designed to maximize employee performance in service of an employer’s strategic objectives.

Question 18

Define HW or H/W?

Answer 18

HW or H/W
Hardware refers to IT equipment or fixed assets such as desktops, servers, storage, network equipment, etc.. From a financial perspective, the hardware cost pool includes hardware depreciation (from CapEx investments), hardware expense (e.g. monitors, keyboards, cables, memory, spare parts, etc.), and maintenance & support.

Question 19

What is a Hypervisor?

Answer 19

Hypervisor
A program that manages two or more operating systems on a single server. The hypervisor controls the resources and processor on the server, ensuring each operating system has the resources it needs to perform as needed.

Question 20

What is IaaS?

Answer 20

IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service is the hardware is provided by an external provider and managed for you IaaS provides all the infrastructure to support web apps, including storage, web and application servers, and networking resources. Examples include servers and storage, data center physical plant/building.

Question 21

What is an Identifier?

Answer 21

Identifier
A column in an object’s unit table that defines the category that the object reports on. The identifier also specifies how data is grouped in an object’s unit table. The identifier indicates the direct mapping of units from another object.

Question 22

What are Indirect Costs?

Answer 22

Indirect Costs
Costs not directly related to the principal activity of the business.

Question 23

What is Inference?

Answer 23

Inference
A set of relationships among data/table columns uploaded into an Apptio instance. The relationships are discovered by Apptio’s Inference engine. A relationship between two or more columns is established when the columns are configured for discovery and there is matching data in both columns. The relationship is individually called a concept and each concept may have one or more concept links. Each concept link represents a unique combination of any two columns in the relationship and contains data match information between the two columns.

Question 24

What is ITFM?

Answer 24

IT Financial Management (ITFM) is the oversight of expenditures required to deliver IT products and services. The discipline is based on traditional enterprise financial and accounting best practices, such as mandating documentation of expenses and requiring regular audits and reports. However, IT financial management methods and practices are adapted to address the particular requirements of managing IT assets and resources.

Financial Management for IT Services is an element of the service delivery process area in the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) ITSM (information technology service management) framework. The ITIL framework is designed to standardize the selection, planning, delivery and support of IT services to a business. The financial management component of the service delivery framework provides best practices for cost-effective oversight of IT assets and resources.

NOTE: The main goal of IT financial management is providing the organization with an accurate and complete view of spending for all IT resources. Spend analysis for this process involves collecting, categorizing and evaluating expenditure-related data. The end purpose is optimization of IT spending and increased profitability.

Financial management is an essential component of IT procurement, the series of activities and procedures necessary to acquire IT products and services.

Question 25

What is ITP?

Answer 25

ITP
The Apptio IT Planning application, also known as Planning.

See also Planning.

Question 26

What does ITRT & ITRST stand for?

Answer 26

ITRT or ITRST
IT Resource Tower or IT Resource Tower and Sub-Towers.

IT Resource Towers (and Sub-Towers) are a standardized way of looking at common infrastructure functions that perform certain types of work and are responsible for specific outcomes. Examples used in the Apptio applications:

* Resource Towers: Compute, Storage, Data Network, Application, IT Management
* Sub-Towers: Compute – Wintel, Compute – Linux; Data Network – WAN, Data Network – LAN, etc.)

The Apptio applications use IT Resource towers to aggregate the TCO of direct costs coming into these functions including personnel, hardware, software, facilities, outside services, and other costs. These are effective in maintaining a consistent way of tracking and comparing costs over time even though the IT organization structure (and related cost centers) will likely change. It all provides a means to enable peer comparison through benchmarking.

Question 27

Describe IT Spend?

Answer 27

IT Spend
IT Spend is the total annual spend for IT to support an enterprise. IT spend can come from anywhere in the enterprise that incurs IT costs. It is calculated on an annualized “cash flow view,” which contains capital spending and operational expenses, but not depreciation or amortization. Organizations that do not track IT spend can instead use their IT budget for the year.

NOTE: IT spend does not include Shadow IT, a technology that falls within the scope of standard IT spend but is outside the control of the IT department. The IT department is not consulted about, nor does it support, this technology.

Question 28

Describe IT Spend as a Percentage of Revenue?

Answer 28

IT Spend as a Percentage of Revenue
IT Spend as a Percentage of Revenue metric is the most recognized measure of total IT investment relative to top-line business results.

NOTE: The value of the IT Spend as a Percent of Revenue metric is that it assists in identifying the competitiveness of investment levels relative to revenue, which is the most fundamental measure of business performance.

The metric alone does not explain why spending levels are at, above, or below median (which are often misinterpreted as “good” or “bad”), nor does it reflect IT’s contribution to business performance. Thus, IT Spend as a Percent of Revenue needs to be considered in tandem with other industry benchmark metrics and in the context of business objectives, the rate of change, and the overall circumstances affecting the numerator and denominator of the calculation.

NOTE: If your IT spend only represents the spend for certain business units, the revenue number should likewise correspond only to those business units.

Question 29

What is a JAR?

Answer 29

JAR
An archive file format typically used to aggregate many Java class files and associated metadata and resources (text, images and so on) into one file to distribute application software or libraries on the Java platform.

Question 30

What does JDBC stand for?

Answer 30

JDBC
A Java-based data access technology (Java Standard Edition platform) from Oracle Corporation. This technology is an API for the Java programming language that defines how a client may access a database. It provides methods for querying and updating data in a database. JDBC is oriented towards relational databases. A JDBC-to-ODBC bridge enables connections to any ODBC accessible data source in the JVM host environment.

Question 31

What is Jetty?

Answer 31

Jetty
A pure Java-based HTTP server and Java Servlet container. The web server is used in products such as ActiveMQ, Alfresco, Apache Geronimo, Apache Maven, Google App Engine, Eclipse, FUSE, Twitter’s Streaming API and Zimbra. Jetty is also the server in open source projects such as Lift, Eucalyptus, Red5 and Hadoop. Jetty supports the latest Java Servlet API (with JSP support) as well as protocols SPDY and WebSocket.

Question 32

What is a JIRA?

Answer 32

JIRA
A bug-tracking system produced by Atlassian, the maker of Confluence. It supports a number of add-ons (e.g.: Greenhopper that allows for Agile activity tracking).

Question 33

Describe the Fixed-to-Variable: Metric?

Answer 33

Monitor your fixed-to-variable cost ratio and ensure it is in line with the needs of your business. Keep in mind that with this ratio, lower is not always better. For some organizations, especially those with economies of scale, a higher proportion of fixed costs may be advantageous. Businesses that experience more significant organizational changes, especially reductions in staff, generally benefit from a higher proportion of variable costs.

Question 34

Describe the IT Spend Ratio: Metric?

Answer 34

IT Spend Ratio:
IT portfolio management stratify IT investment portfolio according to four categories of investment: infrastructure, transactional, informational, and strategic (For an excellent discussion of IT portfolio management along these four dimensions, refer to: Weill, Peter, and Sinan Aral. “Generating Premium Returns on Your IT Investments.” MIT Sloan Management Review 47.2 (2006): 39-48. Print.).

These categories are aligned to the type of benefit conferred by the investment. Their portfolios are cast along the following three strata: run-the-business (RTB), grow-the-business (GTB), and transform-the-business (TTB). Over the past several years, CIOs have seen their budgets tighten and have had less to allocate to GTB and TTB.

Their combined ratios (GTB + TTB) fell from about 38% of total IT budgets in 005 to 33% in 2008, but have made modest improvements since then (i.e., to 35% in 2010).