Marco Nardello Technological progress has allowed enterprises to collect large amounts of data on their products, processes, and services. This progress is part of the Industry 4.0 transformation. Due to this transformation, enterprises are likely … Read more
Amazon: The book shows you how to plan, implement, and achieve SOA value through its prescriptive approach, joining the business and strategic perspective to the technical and architectural perspective. Applicable to all industries, technology platforms, and operating environments, this innovative book provides you with the essential strategies to drive greater value from your SOA and realize your business goals.
Enterprise architecture defines a firm’s needs for standardized tasks, job roles, systems, infrastructure, and data in core business processes. Thus, it helps a company to articulate how it will compete in a digital economy and it guides managers’ daily decisions to realize their vision of success. This book clearly explains enterprise architecture’s vital role in enabling – or constraining – the execution of business strategy. The book provides clear frameworks, thoughtful case examples, and a proven-effective structured process for designing and implementing effective enterprise architectures.
Thomas L. Friedman is not so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a presentist. His aim in The World Is Flat, as in his earlier, influential Lexus and the Olive Tree, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in your lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The world isn’t going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman’s breathless narrative much of its urgency, and which also saves it from the Epcot-style polyester sheen that futurists–the optimistic ones at least–are inevitably prey to. What Friedman means by “flat” is “connected”: the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. But the news that Friedman has to deliver is that just when we stopped paying attention to these developments–when the dot-com bust turned interest away from the business and technology pages and when 9/11 and the Iraq War turned all eyes toward the Middle East–is when they actually began to accelerate. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete–and win–not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well. (He doesn’t forget the “mutant supply chains” like Al-Qaeda that let the small act big in more destructive ways.)
“The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject. For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a “Connector”: he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere “wasn’t just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston,” he was also a “Maven” who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day–think of how often you’ve received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you. Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the “stickiness” of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell’s closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that “tipping point,” like “future shock” or “chaos theory,” will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows–or at least knows by name. –Ron Hogan Book Description: This celebrated New York Times bestsellernow poised to reach an even wider audience in paperbackis a book that is changing the way North Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas. Gladwells new afterword to this edition describes how readers can constructively apply the tipping point principle in their own lives and work. Widely hailed as an important work that offers not only a road map to business success but also a profoundly encouraging approach to solving social problems.
Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual tells the tale of Vorpal Inc., a company that pioneers the implementation of service-oriented architecture to transform its business model. CEO Jane Moneymaker believes in marketing manager Hugo Wunderkind’s idea of creating a new market using non-traditional methods based on mashups, but struggles to achieve this vision. The story illustrates what it takes to achieve cultural change, overturning established business and IT structures. By embracing a service-oriented approach Moneymaker makes Vorpal faster, flexible and more responsive, bringing an end to business as usual. Mashup Corporations takes a unique approach to communicating its message. From the first page, readers will find themselves in a story populated with people who interact in ways that will ring true to others who have struggled to make technology work in an organization, large or small. The conflicts that naturally arise between CEOs, CIOs, and line of business managers illustrate the important issues at stake within Vorpal and most other companies. As the leaders of Vorpal find their way out of their predicament, rules about how mashups and service orientation can be properly applied emerge. These rules, which may be the most enduring contribution of the book, are illustrated and analyzed using real-life examples.