Books

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Building an Enterprise Architecture Practice

Building an Enterprise Architecture Practice provides practical advice on how to develop your enterprise architecture practice. The authors developed different tools and models to support organizations in implementing and professionalizing an enterprise architecture function. The application of these tools and models in many different organizations forms the basis for this book. The result is a hands-on book that will help you to avoid certain pitfalls and achieve success with enterprise architecture.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century. Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You’ll read about: • Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry. • Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production. • Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems. An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

Winning by not competing: a fresh approach to strategy Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating “blue oceans”: untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—which the authors call “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.

The Laws of Simplicity

Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We’re rebelling against technology that’s too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte “read me” manuals. The iPod’s clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that’s simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design–guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. Maeda–a professor in MIT’s Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer–explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of “improved” so that it doesn’t always mean something more, something added on. Maeda’s first law of simplicity is “Reduce.” It’s not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren’t distracted by features and functions they don’t need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: “Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple.” Maeda’s concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products–how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls “The One,” tells us: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”

We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business

Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, Foreword by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals what works, and what doesn’t, when you are building community into your decision making and business processes. In We Are Smarter Than Me, you will discover exactly how to use social networking and community in your business, driving better decision-making and greater profitability. The book shares powerful insights and new case studies from product development, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, finance, management, and beyond. You’ll learn which business functions can best be accomplished or supported by communities; how to provide effective moderation, balance structure with independence, manage risk, define success, implement effective metrics, and much more. From tools and processes to culture and leadership, We Are Smarter than Me will help you transform the promise of social networking into a profitable reality.

Ryanair: How a Small Irish Airline Conquered Europe

The supercharged growth of this low-cost airline has actually changed the way countless people live their lives, whether it be Ireland’s new “Ryanair Generation” for whom its cheap flights to Dublin have eliminated much permanent emigration to the UK, or the thousands of Britons now enabled to buy holiday homes in rural France. This is the first book to tell the full story of the Ryanair phenomenon, from its inauspicious beginnings to its current dominance, from the secret of its business strategy to its cavalier stunts and practices. Siobhan Creaton has spoken to Ryanair employees past and present, as well as its top management and those at its major rivals like British Airways and easyJet, to produce an authoritative, objective and compulsive account of one of the most colorful companies in Europe. With Ryanair continuing to expand, the battle for the low-cost airline market in Europe becoming ever more cutthroat, and chief executive Michael O’Leary happy to do battle with everyone from airports (for their landing charges) to his own pilots (over pay and conditions)—and generate an endless stream of PR and news stories in the process—this edition of Siobhan Creaton’s book is fully updated to take account of all Ryanair’s most recent history.