Books

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Sustainable Enterprise Architecture

Intended for anyone charged with coordinating enterprise architectural design in a small, medium, or large organization, Sustainable Enterprise Architecture helps you explore the various elements of your own particular network environment to develop strategies for mid- to long-term management and sustainable growth. Organized much like a book on structural architecture, this one starts with a solid foundation of frameworks and general guidelines for enterprise governance and design. The book covers common considerations for all enterprises, and then drills down to specific types of technology that may be found in your enterprise. It explores strategies for protecting enterprise resources and examines technologies and strategies that are only just beginning to take place in the modern enterprise network.

Greening IT

Information Technology is responsible for approximately 2% of the world’s emission of greenhouse gases. The IT sector itself contributes to these greenhouse gas emissions, through its massive consumption of energy – and therefore continuously exacerbates the problem. At the same time, however, the IT industry can provide the technological solutions we need to optimise resource use, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We call this Greening IT. This book looks into the great potential of greening society with IT – i.e. the potential of IT in transforming our societies into Low-Carbon societies. The book is the result of an internationally collaborative effort by a number of opinion leaders in the field of Greening IT.

DefrICtion: Unleashing your Enterprise to Create Value from Change

Michael is CEO of a $64 billion global corporation, driving a strategy founded on productivity and growth. Despite having ‘best practices’ in place, spearheaded by Finance, he’s convinced that many of the company’s investments in change are still not delivering the most value they can, or even the value they promised. Late one night, while reading a hard-to-believe Business Case for an IT transformation, he makes it his business to find out why. With the help of his inner-circle of trusted executives and managers, and the serendipitous appearance of a friend-of-a-friend, Michael discovers what’s been missing all along in the Boardroom, the businesses, and the company culture. He is faced with deciding what it’s worth to sort things out, once and for all, with a strategy that combines Enterprise Architecture with Investing in Change. In this conclusion to the trilogy that began with FruITion and continued with RecrEation, Michael finds that the consequences for everyone are part cultural, part structural, and part operational. They mean challenging some of the orthodoxies that were supposed to solve the problem but have made things worse instead. What will he choose to do?

What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

Obviously, there are lots of things that matter now. But in a world of fractured certainties and battered trust, some things matter more than others. While the challenges facing organizations are limitless; leadership bandwidth is not. That is why you have to be clear about what really matters now. What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead? Hamel identifies five issues are that are paramount: values, innovation, adaptability, passion and ideology. In doing so he presents an essential agenda for leaders everywhere.

The Fall of Public Man

“Public” life once meant that vital part one’s life outside the circle of family and close friends. Connecting with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way and yet remaining aloof from them was seen as the means by which the human animal was transformed into the social – the civilized – being. And the fullest flowering of that public life was realized in the 18th Century in the great capital cities of Europe. Sennett shows how our lives today are bereft of the pleasures and reinforcements of this lost interchange with fellow citizens. He shows how, today, the stranger is a threatening figure; how silence and observation have become the only ways to experience public life, especially street life, without feeling overwhelmed ; how each person believes in the right, in public, to be left alone. And he makes clear how, because of the change in public life, private life becomes distorted as we of necessity focus more and more on ourselves, on increasingly narcissistic forms of intimacy and self-absorption. Because of this, our personalities cannot fully develop: we lack much of the ease, the spirit of play, the kind of discretion that would allow us real and pleasurable relationships with those whom we may never know intimately.