Books

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Thinking in Systems: A Primer

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Meadows’ newly released manuscript, edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world – war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation – are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. Although both tools and methods are included, the heart of the book reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble and to continue to learn. Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

A Practical Guide to Earned Value Project Management

Now you don’t have to know accounting to understand and reap the benefits of earned value project management. In one convenient resource, “A Practical Guide to Earned Value Project Management” spells out everything you need to know to use this highly effective project management tool. First you’ll get an overview of the earned value management system (EVMS) and how it’s used. Then you’ll take a look at the 32 criteria – and learn how each corresponds with successful project management. Next, you’ll move through the lifecycle of a sample project to see how the components of the earned value system are applied. Along the way, you’ll learn how to: interpret and use the earned value management system to manage your projects; compute variances that are more meaningful to project owners and project teams; design reports and graphs with more valuable information; address unfavorable earned value metrics; and compare projects to better understand which ones are doing well, which are in trouble, and which need to go.

Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering

Achieving enterprise success necessitates addressing enterprises in ways that match the complexity and dynamics of the modern enterprise environment. However, since the majority of enterprise strategic initiatives appear to fail – among which those regarding information technology – the currently often practiced approaches to strategy development and implementation seem more an obstacle than an enabler for strategic enterprise success. Two themes underpin the fundamentally different views outlined in this book. First, the competence-based perspective on governance, whereby employees are viewed as the crucial core for effectively addressing the complex, dynamic and uncertain enterprise reality, as well as for successfully defining and operationalizing strategic choices. Second, enterprise engineering as the formal conceptual framework and methodology for arranging a unified and integrated enterprise design, which is a necessary condition for enterprise success.

Sensemaking in Organizations

The teaching of organization theory and the conduct of organizational research have been dominated by a focus on decision-making and the concept of strategic rationality. However, the rational model ignores the inherent complexity and ambiguity of real-world organizations and their environments. In this landmark volume, Karl E Weick highlights how the ‘sensemaking’ process shapes organizational structure and behaviour. The process is seen as the creation of reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves.

Advances in Government Enterprise Architecture

Over the past two decades, the government sector has emerged as the area of largest implementation of enterprise architecture – a critical success factor for all types, scales, and intensities of e-government programs. Advances in Government Enterprise Architecture is a seminal publication in the emerging and evolving discipline of enterprise architecture (EA). Presenting current developments, issues, and trends in EA, this critical resource provides IT managers, government CIOs, researchers, educators, and professionals with insights into the impact of effective EA on IT governance, IT portfolio management, and IT outsourcing, creating a must-have holding for academic libraries and organizational information centers.

Making Sense of the Organization

This volume brings together the best–known and most influential articles on sensemaking by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick. Weick explores the process of how organizations discover that they face important decisions. Often organizations have discussions in order to see what they think, or act in order to see what they want – before they are even aware that a decision has to be made. The effective organization is one that understands this process of sensemaking and learns to manage it with wisdom. The ways in which people do that are demonstrated in chapters of this book. This important collection provides a valuable addition to the international literature on organization theory and will be welcomed by students and researchers alike.