Books

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The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures

Innovation is an evergreen topic because it is such an essential ingredient for successful growth – and this book provides a new and fascinating perspective on how new innovations can best be found and developed. Managers from all kinds of companies will find this book of interest. This book is so well written and is filled with such engaging examples that we expect it to break out beyond a business audience to general readers. It is similar to The Tipping Point in terms of tone, readability, and rich, interesting stories, which show how innovative ideas were born in intersections that combined arenas as diverse as card games and sky rises, Palm Pilots and carrots, airplanes and cookies, ants and truck drivers. Offers practical strategies anyone can use to develop novel new ideas big and small, in all areas of life and work. The book’s title refers to an explosion of creativity that occurred in Florence during the Renaissance, when the Medici banking family funded creators from many different disciplines to come together to debate, discuss, and discover new ideas. The book is about how any of us can create our own ‘Medici effects’ using the concept of ‘the intersection’.

I/T Architecture in Action

This book is for business professionals interested in learning techniques for managing change in technology driven companies. It focuses on bridging business and I/T strategies through the Enterprise Architecture function. Unlike many books about I/T, it is not about building things. Rather, it is about what business people can do with what I/T produces.

Enterprise Architecture Good Practices Guide: How to Manage the Enterprise Architecture Practice

The purpose of this guide is to provide guidance to organization’s in initiating, developing, using, and maintaining their enterprise architecture (EA) practice. This guide offers a set of Enterprise Architecture Good Practices that have proven their benefits to organizations and that addresses an end-to-end process to initiate, implement, and sustain an EA program, and describes the necessary roles and associated responsibilities for a successful EA program. Enterprise Architecture is a complete expression of the enterprise; a master plan which acts as a collaboration force between aspects of business planning such as goals, visions, strategies and governance principles; aspects of business operations such as business terms, organization structures, processes and data; aspects of automation such as information systems and databases; and the enabling technological infrastructure of the business such as computers, operating systems and networks.

Value-driven It: Achieving Agility and Assurance Without Compromising Either

This book explains how to connect tangible business value with IT decisions, and how to build an organization around that practice. It describes how to create an agile IT organization that implements governance in a nimble yet effective manner that, and that turns that into a strategic advantage. It explains how to connect enterprise architecture with business strategy, and how to reconcile the many different perspectives of architecture, including business architecture, data architecture, and software architecture. These are addressed at all levels, from the project to the CIO, and in terms of how IT should interact with the other parts of the organization.

Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management

Strategy is the most prestigious but also the most confusing part of business. Managers are constantly bombarded with new jargon and the latest fads promising the magic bullet for every strategic problem. The world of strategy can seem to be an impenetrable jungle. Strategy Safari presents a powerful antidote to the dilemma of needing to know about strategy and yet not being able to find any comprehensible guidelines. This revised edition is a comprehensive, colourful and illuminating tour through the wilds of strategic management. In this provocative, jargon-free and extremely readable guide, top strategy authors Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel clearly set out and critique each of the ten major schools of strategic management thinking to help you grasp what you really need to know.