Books

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Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value

If you’re a general manager or CFO, do you feel you’re spending too much on IT or wishing you could get better returns from your IT investments? If so, it’s time to examine what’s behind this IT-as-cost mind-set. In The Real Business of IT, Richard Hunter and George Westerman reveal that the cost mind-set stems from IT leaders’ inability to communicate about the business value they create-so CIOs get stuck discussing budgets rather than their contributions to the organization. The authors show how to communicate about these forms of value with non-IT leaders-so they understand how your firm is benefiting and see IT as the strategic powerhouse it truly is.

The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization: Second edition

Peter Senge, founder and director of the Society for Organisational Learning and senior lecturer at MIT, has found the means of creating a ‘learning organisation’. In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nutured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are contually learning together. The Fifth Discipline fuses these features together into a coherent body of theory and practice, making the whole of an organisation more effective than the sum of its parts.

Architecture Principles: The Cornerstones of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprises, from small to large, evolve continuously. As a result, their structures are transformed and extended continuously. Without some means of control, such changes are bound to lead to an overly complex, uncoordinated and heterogeneous environment that is hard to manage and hard to adapt to future changes. Enterprise architecture principles provide a means to direct transformations of enterprises. As a consequence, architecture principles should be seen as the cornerstones of any architecture. In this book, Greefhorst and Proper focus on the role of architecture principles. They provide both a theoretical and a practical perspective on architecture principles. The theoretical perspective involves a brief survey of the general concept of principle as well as an analysis of different flavors of principles. Architecture principles are regarded as a specific class of normative principles that direct the design of an enterprise, from the definition of its business to its supporting IT. The practical perspective on architecture principles is concerned with an approach to the formulation of architecture principles, as well as their actual use in organizations. To illustrate their use in practice, several real-life cases are discussed, an application of architecture principles in TOGAF is included, and a catalogue of example architecture principles is provided. With this broad coverage, the authors target students and researchers specializing in enterprise architecture or business information systems, as well as practitioners who want to understand the foundations underlying their practical daily work.

Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture: Strategies to Transform Information Systems in the Era of Big Data

Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture is a practical hands-on instruction manual for enterprise architects. This book prepares you to better engage IT, management, and business users by equipping you with the tools and knowledge you need to address the most common enterprise architecture challenges. You will come away with a pragmatic understanding of and approach to enterprise architecture and actionable ideas to transform your enterprise. Experienced enterprise architect James V. Luisi generously shares life cycle architectures, transaction path analysis frameworks, and more so you can save time, energy, and resources on your next big project. As an enterprise architect, you must have relatable frameworks and excellent communication skills to do your job. You must actively engage and support a large enterprise involving a hundred architectural disciplines with a modest number of subject matter experts across business, information systems, control systems, and operations architecture. They must achieve their mission using the influence of ideas and business benefits expressed in simple terms so that any audience can understand what to do and why. Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture gives you the tools to accomplish your goals in less time with fewer resources. It expand your Enterprise Architecture skills so you can do more in less time with less money with the priceless tips presented. It understand the cost of creating new Enterprise Architecture disciplines and contrast those costs to letting them go unmanaged. It includes 10 life cycle architectures so that you can properly assess the ROI of performing activities such as outsourcing, insourcing, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and more. It complete appendix of eight transaction path analysis frameworks provide DBA guidelines for proper physical database design.

Architecting the Future Enterprise

Every enterprise evolves continuously, driven by changing needs or new opportunities. Most often this happens gradually, with small adjustments to strategy, organization, processes, or infrastructure. But sometimes enterprises need to go beyond minor fixes and transform themselves, in response to a disruptive event or dramatically changing circumstances — a merger, for example, or a new competitor. In this book, enterprise architecting experts Deborah Nightingale and Donna Rhodes offer a framework for enterprise transformation. Successful transformation, they believe, starts with a holistic approach, taking into consideration all facets of the enterprise and its environment rather than focusing solely on one factor — information technology, for example, or organizational structure. This is architecting the future enterprise: creating a blueprint for what the enterprise will look like after the transformation. Nightingale and Rhodes introduce the ARIES (Architecting Innovative Enterprise Strategy) framework, including a ten enterprise element model and an architecting process model, and show how to apply it, from start to finish. They explain how to create a holistic vision for the future enterprise and how to generate concepts and alternative architectures; they describe techniques for evaluating possible architectures, tools for implementation planning, and strategies for communicating with stakeholders. Nightingale and Rhodes offer real-world examples throughout, drawing on their work at MIT, with an extensive case study of enterprise transformation at a medical device manufacturer. An appendix offers two additional architecting projects. Seven Architecting Imperatives* Make architecting the initial activity in transformation. * Develop a comprehensive understanding of the enterprise landscape. * Understand what stakeholders value and how that may change in the future.* Use multiple perspectives to see the whole enterprise.* Create an architecting team suited to the transformation challenges.* Engage all levels of leadership in transformation. * Architect for the enterprise’s changing world.

Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture is the discipline of managing the complexities of the Business-IT landscape. It has been around since the 1980’s, when for the first time computers were connected in networks, and the already serious (and unsolved) problem of the complexity of computer programs for relatively simple business needs turned into the huge problem of large networks of them in complex business landscapes. In spite of many ‘best practices’ and ‘frameworks’ that have been introduced, Enterprise Architecture is not a great success. After thirty years, we still have the same problems. Chaos is still everywhere. Projects still fail far too often. In this book, (hidden) assumptions behind the existing approaches to enterprise architecture are challenged, and a more realistic perspective that helps us battle the complexities and unpredictabilities of today’s Business-IT landscapes is described. Practical suggestions about enterprise architecture governance and products, based on real-world experience with the described approach, complete the book. From general management to IT professionals, everyone who is confronted with the problem of managing Business-IT landscapes can profit from the insights this book offers. No specialist prior knowledge is required. Gerben Wierda is author of Mastering ArchiMate, and was, amongst other things, Lead Architect of the Judiciary in The Netherlands, Lead Architect of APG Asset Management, and is now Team Coordinator Architecture and Design at APG.