2012

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Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture

Three schools of thought on enterprise architecture exist, each with its own belief system (definitions, concerns, assumptions, and limitations). A novel taxonomy of these schools creates a starting point for resolving terminological challenges to help establish enterprise architecture as a discipline.

Collaborative Enterprise Architecture: Enriching EA with Lean, Agile, and Enterprise 2.0 Practices

Ever-changing business needs have prompted large companies to rethink their enterprise IT. Today, businesses must allow interaction with their customers, partners, and employees at more touch points and at a depth never thought previously. At the same time, rapid advances in information technologies, like business digitization, cloud computing, and Web 2.0, demand fundamental changes in the enterprises’ management practices. These changes have a drastic effect not only on IT and business, but also on policies, processes, and people. Many companies therefore embark on enterprise-wide transformation initiatives. The role of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is to architect and supervise this transformational journey. Unfortunately, todays EA is often a ponderous and detached exercise, with most of the EA initiatives failing to create visible impact. The enterprises need an EA that is agile and responsive to business dynamics. Collaborative Enterprise Architecture provides the innovative solutions todays enterprises require, informed by real-world experiences and experts’ insights. This book, in its first part, provides a systematic compendium of the current best practices in EA, analyzes current ways of doing EA, and identifies its constraints and shortcomings. In the second part, it leaves the beaten tracks of EA by introducing Lean, Agile, and Enterprise 2.0 concepts to the traditional EA methods. This blended approach to EA focuses on practical aspects, with recommendations derived from real-world experiences. A truly thought provoking and pragmatic guide to manage EA, Collaborative Enterprise Architecture effectively merges the long-term oriented top-down approach with pragmatic bottom-up thinking, and that way offers real solutions to businesses undergoing enterprise-wide change. This title covers the latest emerging technologies affecting business practice, including digitization, cloud computing, agile software development, and Web 2.0. It focuses on the practical implementation of EAM rather than theory, with recommendations based on real-world case studies. It addresses changing business demands and practices, including Enterprise 2.0 , open source, global sourcing, and more. It takes an innovative approach to EAM, merging standard top-down and pragmatic, bottom-up strategies, offering real solutions to businesses undergoing enterprise-wide changes.

Intersection: How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap Between Business, Technology, and People

Many organizations struggle with the dynamics and the complexity of today’s social ecosystems connecting everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time. Facing challenges at the intersection of business models, technical developments and human needs, enterprises must overcome the siloed thinking and isolated efforts of the past, and instead address relationships to people holistically. In Intersection, Milan Guenther introduces a Strategic Design approach that aligns the overarching efforts of Branding, Enterprise Architecture and Experience Design on common course to shape tomorrow’s enterprises. This book gives designers, entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders a holistic model and a comprehensive vocabulary to tackle such challenges. The Enterprise Design framework cuts through the complexity of Strategic Design work, explains how to navigate key aspects and bridge diverging viewpoints. In 9 examples, the author looks at the way companies like Apple, SAP, BBVA, and Jeppesen (a Boeing Company) apply design thinking and practice to shape their enterprises. Moving from strategy to conceptual design and concrete results, Intersection shows what is relevant at which point, and what expertise to involve.

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.

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

Living with people who differ – racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically – is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it. Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. In Together he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature.