Glossary
The vocabulary of IT outsourcing
The terms that recur in tenders and services contracts, defined without spin. Useful if you are arbitrating an IT purchase without being a specialist yourself.
Commercial
- Day rate
- Price billed for one day of an embedded profile's work. A low day rate often hides a junior profile, high turnover, or a steering burden shifted onto the client. Compare day rates at equivalent seniority and responsibility scope, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
- Time and materials
- Model where the client buys days of skill and keeps the steering. Best-efforts obligation, not an obligation of result. Suited to a moving backlog, provided an internal product owner is genuinely available.
- Fixed price
- Model where the provider commits to a scope, a price and a deadline. Obligation of result. Requires a written, frozen scope beforehand: without framing, a firm fixed price is either an unpriced gamble or a promise that will be made back through change orders.
- Application maintenance
- Third-party application maintenance: a contract under which an external provider handles corrective, adaptive and often preventive work on an existing application. Measured in response and restoration times, not in ticket counts.
- Nearshore
- Outsourcing to a geographically and culturally close country. For a French client, Morocco offers the same time zone year-round and French as a working language, which removes the two main causes of failure in distant offshore work.
Contractual
- Reversibility
- The set of obligations enabling the client to take back or transfer the service to a third party: documentation, knowledge transfer, repository access, assistance duration. Must be written into the initial contract, never negotiated on the way out.
- Syntec index
- French reference index for revising the price of intellectual services. Used as an annual revision cap in IT services contracts, it protects the client from discretionary day-rate increases.
GDPR
- DPA (data processing agreement)
- Contract required by GDPR Article 28 between a controller and its processor. It specifies the subject matter, duration, nature of processing, data categories, sub-processors and security measures. Its absence is a non-compliance of the controller — that is, of you.
- Standard contractual clauses
- Clauses adopted by the European Commission (decision 2021/914) allowing personal data transfers to a country without an adequacy decision. They must be accompanied by a transfer impact assessment and, where relevant, supplementary measures.
- CNDP
- Morocco's national data protection authority, established by law 09-08. Any personal data processing carried out in Morocco must be declared to it. This obligation is in addition to the GDPR where the client is European.
Delivery
- Framing
- Preliminary phase producing the functional specification, target architecture, acceptance cases and exclusion list. It is the document that makes a firm price possible. Given away free, it is systematically rushed, because its purpose becomes the signature rather than accuracy.
- Joint acceptance
- Phase where the client tests the deliverable against cases written up front, each defect classified against a grid defined at framing. Without that grid, the end of a project turns into a negotiation about what counts as a defect.
Technical
- Technical debt
- Future cost induced by a design choice made to move fast. It is not a defect in itself: taking on debt consciously and documenting it is a valid decision. The problem starts when nobody knows how much there is or where it sits.
- WLanguage
- Proprietary language from vendor PC SOFT, used by WinDev, WebDev and WinDev Mobile. Widespread in French business applications, with a large installed base and a sharply shrinking developer pool — which makes it a continuity risk for many mid-market companies.
- HFSQL
- Database engine built into the PC SOFT ecosystem. Runs in file or client-server mode. Porting it to a standard SQL engine is possible but rarely trivial, since queries and reports are often tightly coupled to it.
Data
- ETL / ELT
- Two execution orders for feeding a data warehouse. ETL transforms before loading; ELT loads first and transforms inside the warehouse. ELT has dominated since in-warehouse compute became cheap, but ETL remains relevant when raw source data must not leave its perimeter.
- Data lineage
- Traceability of a data item from its source to its final use. Without lineage it is impossible to know which report breaks if a flow changes, which leads teams to stop deleting anything and the estate to grow indefinitely.
AI
- Model drift
- Degradation of a model's performance because the reality it describes has changed. A model without drift monitoring degrades silently, often unnoticed for months. That is why a model without monitoring is not an acceptable deliverable.
- Baseline
- The simplest solution that addresses the problem, used as a mandatory reference. A machine learning model that does not beat a moving average should not ship. Establishing the baseline first avoids deploying complexity that adds nothing.
Automation
- RPA
- Robotic process automation: software reproducing a user's actions in applications that expose no programmatic interface. Justified against closed packages; to be avoided where an API exists, since it breaks on every screen change.
Cloud
- Infrastructure as code
- Description of infrastructure in versioned files, allowing it to be destroyed and rebuilt identically. The test is simple: if you cannot recreate a full environment from the repository, your infrastructure is not described as code.
- FinOps
- Discipline of cloud cost management, tying each expense to a usage and an owner. The most common gains come not from price negotiations but from sizing, orphaned resources and non-production environments left running.
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