Books

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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.

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.