And yes, I tried using a search engine.
Being in the business, I’d call it a buzzword (although a better buzzword than the current “Information Technology” that I always associate with pencils and telephones and such).
Your best bet is a dictionary definition, such as Bill H. supplied, but if you have particular questions about it, you could throw thoses out here for our viewing.
It’s a pretty vague term and pretty self-explanatory: a system that supplies information for managers to make decisions. That’s probably not much help, but since there are managers at all sorts of levels and information of all sorts of types, it’s going to be pretty vague.
In general, it’s a system that takes the sum total of business transactions or information sources and can summarise them, report exceptions, report patterns and trends, analyse them to project future trends and allow data manipulation to try out ‘what if’ ideas by management.
The higher the level of management using it, the greater the need for accurate summarised data with an ability to drill-down and manipulate the data (more qualitative than quantitative). The lower the level of management, the greater the need to see summaries and exceptions, not to be able to project and plan (more quantitative than qualitative).
Mind you, it is such a buzzword and a hugely catch-all term that you could pretty much write an entirely different definition to that and it would still be on the mark.
From whatis.com:
Thank you for the responses.