TERMINOLOGY EDITED BY ROBERT MARCINIAK, PH.D. INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT, CORVINUS UNIVERSITY OF BUDAPEST
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI): refers to technologies that are able to think and process information in a humanlike way. Artificial intelligence solutions are also called cognitive computing. ASSISTED (ROBOTIC PROCESS) AUTOMATION: refers to a software robot that responds to front-office employeetriggered actions to simplify the workflow. Typically, it runs on local workstations, desktops as a virtual assistant meaning they manipulate the same front-office programs as the human employees. ATTENDED AUTOMATION: occurs in some rule-based backoffice processes that can only be partly automated and require human intervention and judgement to be applied in between the process. BACKSOURCING: transfer services back in-house from an external service provider. BASIC AUTOMATION: automation of activities within a specific software environment (e.g. VBA macros and scripts). BLOCKCHAIN: a cryptographically secure, distributed ledger that is a peer-to-peer system for validating, updating, time-stamping, and permanently storing transactions by the parties involved in all the transactions within a network. BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI): refers to technologies, applications and practices for collecting, integrating and analysing data about an organisation’s current state and delivering actionable information that helps executives, managers and workers make informed business decisions. BI systems are data-driven Decision Support Systems (DSS).
BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING (BPO): transfer of responsibility for the execution of an entire (end-to-end, E2E) business process to an external service provider. BUSINESS SERVICES CENTRE (BSC): an umbrella term that includes all kinds of service centres that provide business services. CAPTIVE CENTRE: a type of Shared Services Centre that has only internal service recipients/clients (within the same company). It is also called GIC (global-in-house centre). CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE (COE): an organisational unit (sometimes a high value-added subsidiary) that embodies a set of shared capabilities that have been explicitly recognised by the firm as important sources of value creation (e.g. deployment of new organisational and technological solutions), with the intention that these capabilities are leveraged by and/or disseminated to other parts of the firm. In the Business Services Sector, CoE frequently means the whole business centre if it is a knowledge-based service delivery unit. COGNITIVE AUTOMATION (CA): see Intelligent Process Automation COST CENTRE: a business unit that is only responsible for the costs that it incurs. DIGITALISATION: adaptation of digital technologies on the process or organisational level aiming to improve customer/user experience. Digitalisation focuses more on effectiveness. DIGITISATION: converting analogue or paper-based data/ information into digital format. Digitisation focuses more on efficiency. Hungarian GBS Report | Hungary, 2020 105
