Books

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Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology Is Reshaping the Economy

A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education. Brynjolfsson and Saunders go on to examine the real sources of value in the emerging information economy, including intangible inputs and outputs that have defied traditional metrics. For instance, intangible organizational capital is not directly observable on a balance sheet yet amounts to trillions of dollars of value. Similarly, such nonmarket transactions of information goods as Google searches or views of Wikipedia articles are an increasingly large share of the economy yet virtually invisible in the GDP statistics. Drawing on work done at the MIT Center for Digital Business and elsewhere, Brynjolfsson and Saunders explain how to better measure the value of technology in the economy. They treat technology as not just another type of ordinary capital investment by also focusing on complementary investments–including process redesign, training, and strategic changes–and ton he value of product quality, timeliness, variety, convenience, and new products. Innovation continues through booms and busts. This book provides an essential guide for policy makers and economists who need to understand how information technology is transforming the economy and how it will create value in the coming decade.

Enterprise 2.0 – The Art of Letting Go

The book contains articles by renowned international authors in the field such as Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, and David Weinberger, while also presenting selected case studies from Nokia, SAP, Vodafone, and others. The authors address the question of how Web 2.0 technologies can be usefully incorporated as tools within the enterprise. How can one best utilize the advantages and potential represented by Enterprise 2.0? How will an enterprise culture need to change in order to survive as an Enterprise 2.0 organization? Does management benefit from “letting go” and delegating its authority?

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

“Web 2.0” is the portion of the Internet that’s interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web’s novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they’re doing this, and why it’s benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds. Most organizations, however, don’t find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns, and shows how business leaders can overcome them. McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.

The Power of Pull

Exploring the paradigm shift in business brought about by innovations in communication technology, this collaboration from three consultant-authors provides a succinct metaphor for the shift in the information economy-from “push” to “pull”-but little else. Though they provide an effective survey of the effect of more interactive, ubiquitous and on-demand communication, it already feels dated; the essential messages that Hagel, Brown, and Davison derive-networking is key, you should pursue your passions, many traditional ways of doing business are over-are old news in the business self-help section. The examples they provide focus primarily on individually-driven collaborative efforts (wikis, online gaming) and make poor analogies for someone looking to revitalize a corporation or present a compelling case for change to colleagues or an intransigent CEO. Professionals who already know that the Internet isn’t just a phase will need more information than this book provides.

The Social Life of Information

The gap between the hype of the Information Age and its reality is often wide and deep, and it’s into this gap that John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid plunge. Not that these guys are Luddites–far from it. Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid, a historian and social theorist who also works with PARC, measure how information technology interacts and meshes with the social fabric. They write, “Technology design often takes aim at the surface of life. There it undoubtedly scores lots of worthwhile hits. But such successes can make designers blind to the difficulty of more serious challenges–primarily the resourcefulness that helps embed certain ways of doing things deep in our lives.” The authors cast their gaze on the many trends and ideas proffered by infoenthusiasts over the years, such as software agents, “still a long way from the predicted insertion into the woof and warp of ordinary life”; the electronic cottage that Alvin Toffler wrote about 20 years ago and has yet to be fully realized; and the rise of knowledge management and the challenges it faces trying to manage how people actually work and learn in the workplace. Their aim is not to pass judgment but to help remedy the tunnel vision that prevents technologists from seeing larger the social context that their ideas must ultimately inhabit.

Greening IT

Information Technology is responsible for approximately 2% of the world’s emission of greenhouse gases. The IT sector itself contributes to these greenhouse gas emissions, through its massive consumption of energy – and therefore continuously exacerbates the problem. At the same time, however, the IT industry can provide the technological solutions we need to optimise resource use, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We call this Greening IT. This book looks into the great potential of greening society with IT – i.e. the potential of IT in transforming our societies into Low-Carbon societies. The book is the result of an internationally collaborative effort by a number of opinion leaders in the field of Greening IT.