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Collaborative Systems: One where multiple users or agents engage in a shared activity, usually from remote locations.

Competitive Advantage: A company is said to have a competitive advantage over its rivals when it can sustain profits that exceed the average for the industry.

Cost Advantage: Strategic superiority achieved through factors such as access to cheaper inputs, efficient processes, favorable location, skilled workforce, superior technology, and/or waste reduction or elimination.

Decision Support Systems: A computer program application that analyzes business data and presents it so that users can make business decisions more easily.

Differentiation Advantage: Unique benefits or characteristics of a firm, product, or program that set it apart and above its competitors in the customers’ viewpoint.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI): The computer-to-computer exchange of business documents in a standard electronic format between business partners.

Entry Barrier: Are obstacles that make it difficult to enter a given market.

Michael Porter: Wrote the book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, identifying two primary factors, Cost Advantage, and Differentiation Advantage. Developed the 5-force model and the value chain model.

Nicholas Carr: A Harvard professor who wrote his article “IT Doesn’t Matter” where he asserts that information technology is so readily available and the software used so easily copied, businesses cannot hope to implement these tools to provide a competitive advantage.

Porter’s 5 Force Model: A framework developed by economist Michael E. Porter to determine the profitability and attractiveness of a market or market segment. Includes Industry Rivalry, Bargaining Power of Buyers, Bargaining Power of Suppliers, Threat of New Entrants, and Threat of Substitute Products.

Value Chain: A set of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs to deliver a valuable product or service for the market.

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