Books

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recrEAtion: Realizing the Extraordinary Contribution of Your Enterprise Architects

Simon is a seasoned Enterprise Architect who joins a corporation in New York as their first-ever Vice President of Enterprise Architecture. On his very first day, he meets the global Chief Executive Officer (CEO) who asks Simon What do you do? Simon’s reply triggers the CEO to respond in a way that our hero least expects. What follows is a journey across continents and oceans in which Simon uncovers the true meaning of Enterprise Architecture, who is doing it, and how successful they are. On his travels, Simon teams up with senior executives around the world to integrate Enterprise Architecture into their strategies and business plans, and to innovate in the architecture of their enterprise. Everyone he meets has some wisdom to offer, and is looking for his in return. Finally, Simon has to make a choice between the kind of Enterprise Architect he used to be and the one he has become. Join the characters in this sequel to the highly-acclaimed business novel fruITion, as they contribute to Simon’s journey and he makes his final choice. Share in his thoughts and experiences, and join the author in observing key messages along the journey.

Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology Is Reshaping the Economy

A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education. Brynjolfsson and Saunders go on to examine the real sources of value in the emerging information economy, including intangible inputs and outputs that have defied traditional metrics. For instance, intangible organizational capital is not directly observable on a balance sheet yet amounts to trillions of dollars of value. Similarly, such nonmarket transactions of information goods as Google searches or views of Wikipedia articles are an increasingly large share of the economy yet virtually invisible in the GDP statistics. Drawing on work done at the MIT Center for Digital Business and elsewhere, Brynjolfsson and Saunders explain how to better measure the value of technology in the economy. They treat technology as not just another type of ordinary capital investment by also focusing on complementary investments–including process redesign, training, and strategic changes–and ton he value of product quality, timeliness, variety, convenience, and new products. Innovation continues through booms and busts. This book provides an essential guide for policy makers and economists who need to understand how information technology is transforming the economy and how it will create value in the coming decade.

Enterprise 2.0 – The Art of Letting Go

The book contains articles by renowned international authors in the field such as Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, and David Weinberger, while also presenting selected case studies from Nokia, SAP, Vodafone, and others. The authors address the question of how Web 2.0 technologies can be usefully incorporated as tools within the enterprise. How can one best utilize the advantages and potential represented by Enterprise 2.0? How will an enterprise culture need to change in order to survive as an Enterprise 2.0 organization? Does management benefit from “letting go” and delegating its authority?

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

“Web 2.0” is the portion of the Internet that’s interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web’s novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they’re doing this, and why it’s benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds. Most organizations, however, don’t find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns, and shows how business leaders can overcome them. McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.

A Journey Through the Systems Landscape

Systems are everywhere and affect us daily in our private and professional lives. We all use the word system to describe something that is essential but often abstract, complex and even mysterious. However, learning to utilize system concepts as first class objects as well as methodologies for systems thinking and systems engineering provides a basis for removing the mystery and moving towards mastery even for complex systems. This journey through the Systems Landscape has been developed to promote learning to think and act in terms of systems. A unique aspect is the introduction of concrete system semantics provided as a “system survival kit” and based upon a limited number of concepts and principles as well as a mental model called the system-coupling diagram. This discipline independent presentation assists individuals and is essential for building a learning organization that can utilize a systems approach to achieving its enterprise goals. The eight chapters are presented as stops along a journey that successively build system knowledge. Each chapter terminates with a Knowledge Verification section that provides questions and exercises for individuals and groups. Case studies reflecting the utilization of the system related concepts, principles and methodologies are provided as chapter interludes.

The Power of Pull

Exploring the paradigm shift in business brought about by innovations in communication technology, this collaboration from three consultant-authors provides a succinct metaphor for the shift in the information economy-from “push” to “pull”-but little else. Though they provide an effective survey of the effect of more interactive, ubiquitous and on-demand communication, it already feels dated; the essential messages that Hagel, Brown, and Davison derive-networking is key, you should pursue your passions, many traditional ways of doing business are over-are old news in the business self-help section. The examples they provide focus primarily on individually-driven collaborative efforts (wikis, online gaming) and make poor analogies for someone looking to revitalize a corporation or present a compelling case for change to colleagues or an intransigent CEO. Professionals who already know that the Internet isn’t just a phase will need more information than this book provides.