Books

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Align IT: Business Impact Through IT

At last, here is a book that brings IT’s relationship with business to life, and enables you to implement strategy rather than develop it. Richard Wyatt-Haines helps you see the true potential of IT in delivering the growth and success to which you aspire. Whilst you may have seen the chapter headings before, you won’t have seen the topics approached in a manner that helps you understand the what, the why and the how, and then shows you what you have to do on the ground to deliver impact and success.

Enterprise Architectures and Digital Administration: Planning, Design, and Assessment

This is the first book that addresses all three main activities in improving business and technology decisions: the planning, design and assessment of enterprise architectures (EAs). Emphasis is on medium and large-size organizations in the private sector (such as banks, airlines and auto industries) and the public sector (such as federal agencies, local government organizations and military services in the Department of Defense). The book addresses the challenges faced by EA builders through an organized presentation of the issues and a step-by-step approach. The material is based on real-life EA project experience and lessons learned over a decade working in multiple-contractor, multiple-discipline teams, and multiple-agency environments.

Enterprise Architecture: Models and Analyses for Information Systems Decision Making

In the last decade, enterprise architecture has grown into an established approach for management of organization-wide information systems. Enterprise architecture is model based, in the sense that diagrammatic descriptions of the systems and their environment constitute the core of the approach. This book emphasizes the decision-supporting potential of enterprise architecture. It presents a comprehensive set of enterprise architecture models as well as how these may be used to assess important properties of the represented systems, such as availability, modifiability, performance, and information security. The book is directed at two groups of readers. Students are provided a background to enterprise information systems and the problems associated with their management. Practitioners will find hands-on descriptions on how to get started with enterprise architecture in their company.

The Technology Garden: Cultivating Sustainable IT Business Alignment

Many IT deployments fall short of delivering value to the businesses that pay for them. On top of this, the combined forces of rapid business change and technology innovation frequently outpace the ability of IT organisations to make sense of their implications. With business activity and IT now so intimately intertwined, organizations urgently need a framework which allows them to align IT capabilities with business strategies and priorities in a way that is sustainable. A team of IT-expert authors with more than 80 years combined experience have interviewed dozens of CIOs, IT directors and other senior technical and business decision makes to find out what works and what doesn’t. The result is a handbook for organizations of all sizes that want to improve the value of their IT investments, thus enabling their IT capabilities to play a more pivotal business role. Written in plain English that does not descend into technical detail, The Technology Garden provides practical advice for organizations looking to achieve sustainable IT-business alignment. To do so, it defines: Six key principles – a distillation of best practice that readers can apply directly to the domain of IT-business alignment; A framework for their application – a pragmatic roadmap for the application of the principles; Adoption guidelines – a set of self-assessment checklists that readers can use to understand where they are on the IT-business alignment roadmap and how to progress. With groundbreaking research and proven approaches, this blueprint enables readers to understand what is at the heart of IT-business alignment. Combining IT research, analysis and real-world insight, The Technology Garden is the ultimate no-nonsense guide.

Cosmopolitan Vision

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly. Contrasting a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ or ‘outlook’ sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the ‘national outlook’ neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing. A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.

Everything is Miscellaneous

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place–the physical world demanded it–but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous. In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life. From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think–and what you know–about the world.