Book Description
How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business
"The real value of this book is that it makes SOA and Web services, which are critical and business-transforming, crystal-clear to the layman, both business and IT leaders. The book stays focused on the real-world issues facing business and government institutions today. In an industry full of experts of many stripes, Ron and Jason are the real thing: savvy, experienced, and realistic. They have produced a must-read book for management."
—Paul Lipton, Senior Architect, Unicenter Web Services and Application Management Computer Associates
"This is by far the finest publication on SOA of our time. From cover to back, Service Orient or Be Doomed! strips away the layers of confusion most IT stakeholders face when confronted with enterprise architecture, and illustrates pragmatic and practical paths towards a sustainable and efficient enterprise architecture. Both the technically savvy and the bean counters will enjoy this book that speaks to the critical points they need to understand."
—Duane A. Nickull Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems, Inc. Chair, OASIS SOA Reference Model Technical Committee Vice chair, United Nations CEFACT (UN/CEFACT)
"If you're looking for a guide that's based on reality, this is it. These guys know how you can service-orient your enterprise and have the best chance of success. This book is the best SOA tool you can buy. I'm recommending it to everyone."
—Dave Linthicum, CEO, BRIDGEWERX
"Jason and Ron are experts on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and have written the first book that is aimed at helping a nontechnical businessperson understand why the SOA computing revolution is critical to business. Rather than provide a nerdy death via buzzword book, Jason and Ron take a humorous, clever, and insightful romp through this new technology and how it impacts business in general."
—Brad Feld, Mobius Venture Capital
Authors Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer-senior analysts for highly respected IT advisory and analysis firm ZapThink-say it all in the title of their new book, Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business. That is, if you fail to service orient your company, you will fail in competing with the organizations that do.
This provocative new book takes service orientation out of its more familiar technological surroundings within service-oriented architecture and introduces it as a philosophy that advocates its rightful place within a business context, redefining it as a new way of thinking about organizing your business and its processes.
Informal, challenging, and intelligent in style, Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business shows you how you can best use technology resources to meet your company's business goals and empower your company to go from "stuck" to "competitive."
Customer Reviews:
Not a credible book.......2007-05-26
I was very disappointed with this book. The authors do not appear to have done adequate research, or were unable to draw reasonable conclusions. Here is a quote from page 27 where they discuss what they call the IT Rat's Nest.
"Remember, the reason people go down the path to the Rat's Nest is because at every step they select the cheapest, most expediant options and don't consider the long-term gains over short-term benefits"
What a bunch of crap. I have worked as an employee and as a consultant at 50 different companies and I can say that this is overwhelmingly NOT the reason for the rat's nest (which I agree exists). In reality, there are many reasons for the Rat's Nest including technology shifts, skill changes/availability, changes in hw/sw economics, changes in business and most frequently mergers/acquisitions. Yes, customers sometime take the cheap path, but often they just make mistakes, or are affected by other events, while they are trying to do the correct long-term thing. A well-designed DCE or CORBA app, no matter how well designed, is a legacy problem at this point no matter whether the IT people took a short-term or long-term approach. This is a big difference and the authors should have discussed that rather than copping out with a superficial, categorization. They might discuss all this in better detail later in the book but after 50 pages (my personal limit for giving the benfit of the doubt) I stopped reading this book. At that point I no longer thought the authors had the credibility to offer solutions when they clearly do not even understand the problem.
Can anyone make a recommendation for a more insightful SOA book?
A great source of ideas for business people.......2007-05-09
Service Orient or be Doomed is an excellent approach to SOA for non-technical people who wants to make IT based businesses flexible enough to match markets evolution.
This is my sixth purchase of the book. I bought it for my personal reading during 2006, and after that I decided to buy additional copies to give as a gift to some of my business colleagues here in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Great book, easy reading and full of concepts and new ideas. I strongly recommend it.
Javier Bazo
Buenos Aires
Argentina
A must read for executives, managers, architects & analysts.......2007-03-06
Overview
Having read a number of other SOA books, I've developed a pretty sound foundation of what SOA is in terms of the technologies that form its basis, and the relative importance of introducing a service abstraction layer between the business and IS domains.
However, this book (Service Orient or Be Doomed!) caught my attention for two fundamental reasons:
1. It has a strong Amazon rating, and
2. It provides a business (vice technical) perspective on the importance of SOA
I started reading the book late last week and quickly found it to be very well written and absolutely compelling with respect to the message that it conveys. The book's message looks something like this:
* Companies need to be more agile than ever in order to compete in today's economy
* Existing technical solutions are inflexible and prevent business agility
* Service-Oriented Architecture can result in increased business agility, more flexible technical solutions and significant ROI over time
* To make SOA viable, the business itself must become Service-Oriented, which means the technical concepts of abstraction, encapsulation and design-by-contract are now important business constructs that result in a more loosely coupled relationship between business activities (e.g. processes) and automation technologies
* SOA requires the "business" and "technology" domains to converge around a new business organizational construct referred to as service domains
* IS must rethink its organization and technology strategies to better align with the Service-Oriented business
* Resistance to Service-Orientation and SOA is expected because of the level of requisite change
* To overcome the expected resistance and create business agility, SOA must be championed by a senior person or group
* SOA must be planned for, and must begin with small, targeted pilot implementations
* SOA (a discipline) is not equal to Web Services (a technology)
As one editorial review put it:
"Jason and Ron are experts on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and have written the first book that is aimed at helping a nontechnical businessperson understand why the SOA computing revolution is critical to business. Rather than provide a nerdy death via buzzword book, Jason and Ron take a humorous, clever, and insightful romp through this new technology and how it impacts business in general."
I couldn't agree more. The authors obviously understand the technical side of SOA, but they've gone the extra mile and actually provided a more business-side treatment of Service-Orientation that makes a very strong case for the need for most businesses to implement changes - and in many cases large, difficult changes - or ... in their words ... be doomed to inflexibility and failure.
The first five or six chapters of the book focus almost entirely on building a case for the need for Service-Orientation by providing historical perspectives on such things as the dot-com bubble and even back as far as the Industrial Revolution. For non-technical readers (e.g. business folks), the first few chapters may be a little ho-hum, but for the technical reader, the content of these chapters lays a strong foundation upon which the remainder of the book is based. In particular, the authors demonstrate how existing technologies, including middleware, EAI and even standalone Web Services, handcuff the business by creating less-than-flexible solutions that are very resistant to changes ... changes that the business MUST make in order to remain efficient and competitive.
More than any other SOA book that I have read (and I've read most of them), this book effectively makes that case that new shared mental models need to be developed and advocated wherein business- and technical-concerns are integrated into a holistic view of the business that is centered on the notion of a business Service that depends on an array of equally important business resources, e.g. people, material, technology, time, money, etc. In effect, the existing walls between the business and IS domains need to be removed, and in their place a service layer abstraction created that allows the business to compose solutions from Services that conform to meta-data driven "contracts."
The net effect of this approach is a more loosely coupled continuum between business operations and the resources (including technology) that facilitate those operations.
However, this new Service-Orientation and overarching SOA landscape introduces new complexities and abstractions as payment for the increased levels of flexibility and business agility. To manage this new complexity, the business needs enterprise architects and enterprise architecture that drive the Service-Orientation perspective into the enterprise's SOA architecture, and manage the organizations "meta-requirement" for overall business agility.
The authors suggest, and I agree, that a new breed of "Service-Oriented Architect" is desperately needed by the business in order to champion the SOA principles and architectural mandates represented by the Service-Oriented approach.
As an example of the sort of quantum changes that need to be made by a company in order to embrace and adopt Service-Orientation and SOA, the authors note that Services are never really "complete", nor are their requirements ever stable. Instead, the business requirements that a Service may address are subject to frequent change as the business continues to adjust its goals and objectives to meet a continuously fluctuating business environment. Therefore, customary software development lifecycles (SDLC) (e.g., waterfall, spiral, iterative, etc.) are not applicable to Service development because SDLCs assume that a project is completed and a deliverable is promoted into a lifecycle that results in the deployed artifact eventually being retired. However, in the Service-Oriented paradigm, a Service is never completed in the sense that development work is done. Instead, the Service is constantly subjected to new requirements and ongoing refactoring activities in order to keep the service relevant and useful to the business.
Perhaps most importantly, the book puts the concept of a Service squarely in a business context and shows how loosely coupled Services can be composed into business solutions without any direct knowledge of (aka coupling to) underlying technical resources that ultimately implement the service. The authors go to great lengths to demonstrate how important the resulting "loosely coupled" relationship between business logic and program logic is to the business' overall agility.
Lastly, I thought that the authors did a fantastic job of demonstrating how current technologies and solution techniques are too narrowly scoped and result in overly tight coupling between business and technical resources, inconsistent with the requirements of Service-Orientation and SOA. Thus, they make a strong and logically based argument that major changes are needed in order to successfully bridge the business and technology concerns into a cohesive enterprise model that exhibits the necessary quality attributes needed to make the business more agile.
Without reservation, I would highly recommend this book to any company stakeholder and all managers, technicians, architects, analysts and executives interested in and/or concerned about business agility, Service-Orientation, SOA, risk management, process control or corporate compliance (just to name a few).
Strengths
Overall, I thought the book's greatest strength was its underlying "business side" emphasis relative to the whole Service-Orientation issue. The authors set out to convince businesspeople of the need to adopt Service-Orientation and SOA, and I believe they did a great job of doing just that.
While some of the historical background material may be old hat for some readers, I thought the authors did a good job of comparative analysis and in doing so provided a larger referential foundation that was effectively reused throughout the book.
Also, I found the authors' treatment of the concept of loose coupling to be one of the best non-technical examples that I've seen in quite some time. I expect that all readers, especially business managers and executives, will grasp the otherwise heavy-weight concept of coupling in such a way that the virtues of SOA will become more apparent from a business operations perspective, rather than a purely technical (e.g. encapsulation and data hiding) one.
I thought the authors did a great job of describing the role of an architect, and in particular the unique idiosyncrasies of the Service-Oriented Architect role. Additionally, they made a very strong case for the need for an Enterprise Architecture group and went so far as to suggest that EA may need to "own" the company's SOA effort and be properly budgeted to do so.
Finally, I think one of the book's most compelling arguments is that major changes are needed vis-à-vis the status quo in order to realize the business benefits manifest in the Service-Oriented paradigm. Implementing Web Services is not enough (it's actually an anti-pattern (read: bad)). Rather, the business needs to incorporate IT into the business planning process, and IT needs to prepare for that role by rethinking its integration strategies (in particular) and probably implementing a non-trivial reorganization in order to eliminate silos and embrace service domains.
Weaknesses
Overall, I didn't find many weaknesses with the book.
However, if I had to finger one aspect of the book with a critical eye (which doesn't necessarily imply that it is a "weakness"), I would perhaps suggest that the books content is very poignant in its assessment of the current state of IT practices, and clearly suggests that more than one legacy IT role may be on the chopping block when a well-formed SOA practice is finally implemented. I expect that some readers may quake in their boots when they read some of the harder-hitting assertions made by the authors. However, I tend to agree with most (if not all) of the author's points.
On second thought, there is one observation that I made which I am comfortable noting as a weakness. Throughout the book, the authors note that a Service is exposed as a Contracted Interface that defines the relationship between the service consumer and the service provider. Given the critical role of the Contract and the central role that it plays in the whole SOA service abstraction layer, I found it noteworthy that the authors never really provide an example of what a contacted interface would look like (format) or consist of (content model).
Otherwise, no other weaknesses noted.
Recommendations
I would highly recommend this book to all interested parties of SOA or Service-Oriented business architecture and analysis.
Perhaps more importantly, I would encourage the book's widest dissemination among business and IS leadership teams. Ultimately, the book's message is intended for them.
I would have given it more than 5 stars if I could have!.......2006-09-29
I truly would have given this book more than 5 stars if I could have, but Amazon allows only a maximum of 5. This is the only book that I know of that treats the notion of service orientation from a "business first" perspective, portraying technology as an enabling factor rather than a primary factor. And that is exactly the way it should be.
The authors also provide very valuable historical information regarding "how we got here" (e.g. history of the World Wide Web, etc.) which is a necessary part of understanding and applying the concept of service orientation. I highly recommend this book to both business and technical audiences. For business folks, it will provide them with a deep understanding and appreciation for service orientation and - as the title says - how it can truly change your business; and for technical folks, it will enable them to "stretch their mind" to see the true potential of technology when it is applied and viewed in the manner conveyed in this book.
A must-read...the only book of its kind. Bravo Jason and Ron!!!
Joseph Chiusano
Great SOA Overview for Non-Techies.......2006-07-30
Right from the beginning, the authors warn that this is not a technology book, but rather a business book about how new technologies will affect the business, what advantages they can bring, and how they will affect the organization. The book has a great outline which covers the topic from soup to nuts.
An entire chapter is devoted to the concepts of architecture, Enterprise Architecture and the relationship of SOA and EA. The authors clearly understand, and stress, the importance of an enterprise level approach to service orientation and identify the EA / SOA organization as the likely or best place for many of the artifacts, initiatives and other factors critical to SOA.
If you're struggling to explain SOA to the business or you're trying to implement or introduce SOA into your organization, pick up a copy of this book and pass it on the manager, business, CIO or CEO. This will be a great aid in getting the concepts of SOA (and incidentally, the importance of architecture) across to them.
Book Description
This is the second edition of the book, identical in all respects to the first but with the addition of a single page detailing the six intelligence and counterintelligence failures that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur. This book is about the reinvention of national, defense and business intelligence within the larger context of an open world--a world where "Evil Empires" and the Berlin Wall have fallen--but also a world where transportation, power, financial, and communications infrastructures are so open as to dramatically increase the vulnerability of America to trans-continental epidemics, anonymous information terrorism, and nation-wide power black-outs and financial melt-downs. As the world enters the Information Century, and simultaneously confronts the fragmentation of many nation-states and the emergence of widespread ethnic, tribal and criminal gang terrorism and confrontation, no topic can be more important to federal, state, and local governments--and to international, national, and local businesses than the topic of "intelligence". Thankfully, there are many positive lessons and methods to be drawn from the U.S. Intelligence Community, and there are a wealth of open sources and services that can be drawn upon to make both government and business "smarter" about their environment, their customers, and their competitors. This book is a primer on the role of intelligence qua sources, methods, and community at the dawn of the 21st century.
Customer Reviews:
Intelligence Future Shock.......2007-07-31
Most current and objective risk assessments indicate that the risk environment faced by the U.S. during the Cold War has drastically changed. The risk of conventional war with peer nation states has been greatly reduced while the risk of asymmetrical war by non-state actors has greatly increased. Further because of the dynamics of the globalization, regional instability, failed states, pandemics, poverty, and immigration all have become serious risks to U.S. National Security. This new risk environment clearly needs a new carefully crafted National Security Strategy based among other things on timely and accurate strategic intelligence.
Which brings us to this altogether remarkable book by Robert David Steele. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the many recent efforts at reform the U.S. Intelligence System remains culturally moribund. Steele offers a rather detailed plan to rebuild this system into an open, flexible, and relevant source of knowledge about the threats and risks faced by the U.S. in the 21st Century. It is necessary not just to read this book, but to think carefully about what Steele is proposing. For example, this reviewer had to really contemplate such strange concepts as a "Global Knowledge Foundation" and "University of the Republic", before fully understanding how such institutions are vitally important to the sort of Intelligence System that Steele is advocating.
Now Steele has written a number of books that offer innovative, if radical, ideas about reforming intelligence, but this is the only one of his books that provides sufficient details to understand how he really would like to transform the U.S. Intelligence System into a system capable of dealing with both military and non-military threats and risks to U.S. security. The opportunities and risks of the phenomenon called "Globalization" are fluid and often elusive. It will take an intelligence system such as the one Steele is advocating to provide the knowledge needed to formulate an effective National security Strategy to deal with both the opportunities and risks.
This book is not an easy read. Readers need to be pro-active in critically thinking about what Steele presents. This effort will be rewarded with new and original insights on the state of U.S. security. More to the point Steele will provide the reader with a clear and unique understanding of the often arcane world of intelligence.
Steele exposes the failure of the cult of secrecy.......2003-08-03
Robert Steele is the one man crusade for the importance of open source intel. This and his more recent New Intelligence tell and show why open source intel is the most useful means of understanding the world around us and at the same time maintaining our personal liberties. To him each citizen should be running their own open source collection in in the areas of their personal interest. Read both of these books. Buy both of these books. Then go to the OSS convention in Washington. You'll quickly see how muth the professionals think of him.
relevant to DC sniper case.......2002-11-09
For over a decade, Steele has been trying to draw attention to the fact that intelligence needs in the post-Cold-War era require different strategy, organization and tactics. This book is a useful summary of his views.
One point of emphasis is "open source" intelligence--the information that is available from sources outside of the secret intelligence community. Steele argues that the institutional secretiveness of the FBI and CIA is a hindrance rather than a help.
Another point of emphasis is language translation. A further point of emphasis is the fact that threats no longer exclusively take the form of powerful nation-states. I wish that the book focused more specifically on Islamic terrorism, since the other potential threats seem more remote at the moment.
Yet another point of emphasis is database integration. Writing this review in the aftermath of the DC sniper investigation, this seems to be an important point. Before the suspects drove to Maryland, they were involved in a murder in Alabama at which one of them left a fingerprint. Had the Alabama police been able to access a national database, they would have been able to identify the murderer and perhaps apprehend him. Instead, the fingerprint was matched only after a dozen more murders and after the suspects themselves told police to connect the dots to Alabama.
Lack of database integration kills.
Nice contents, ugly packaging........2002-07-20
As a book, it's rather ugly. The pages are obviously printed out by an inkjet printer or something (you can actually see some jaggies in the font), and the index is created by MSWord indexing menu, which has multiple entries of the same item, and the way he indexes whole phrases makes it very hard to look up.
It's contents are extremely repetitive. You'll see the same ideas and examples expressed over and over and over and over again, in almost exact same wording. With proper editing, this book would have become 1/3 the volume that it is. The ideas are interesting, although some part, like his suggenstion that the US government should engage in industrial spying, seems questionable. Also, when he uses the word "Open Source", it's not the open source that the people in the software community is used to, so be careful. But it's a book worth skimming through.
9/11 is for intelligence what Sputnik was for science.......2001-12-12
This book, the second edition, is an exact copy of the first edition with two changes: the publisher, and a new one-page Publisher's Foreword that itemizes the six intelligence and counterintelligence failures that allowed 9/11 to happen.
9/11 is for intelligence what Sputnik was for science. The across-the-board failure of clandestine intelligence (overseas), counterintelligence (at home) and our generally mediocre understanding of the real world (since we lack a properly funded, language-qualified foreign or diplomatic service), all contributed equally.
Henry Kissinger is absolutely right when he laments the lack of any serious consideration of foreign policy in recent presidential and congressional elections, and that is what 9/11 must change--this book is intended to be useful to citizens as well as government and business intelligence professionals. It lays out with great precision (see the index) both $11.6 billion dollars (out of $30 billion a year) in potential savings that could be applied to the new craft of intelligence, and it recommends with great precision all that should be in a new National Security Act of 2002.
Intelligence in the 21st Century is too important to be relegated to a chaotic cluster of secret government agencies. It is time for all citizens to take an interest in intelligence, to migrate the proven process of intelligence (there is a great deal that is good about the U.S. intelligence community) into the business sector as well as over to the sovereign states and their localities, and to demand of our elected representatives a proper accounting for the failure, and measures to prevent future failures.
Less than 2% of the $30 billion a year intelligence has been spent on terrorism--the policy and intelligence leadership over several administrations have given lip-service to the war on terrorism--and there will be no improvements, no matter how much money we pour into intelligence and counterintelligence, unless we change the fundamentals--who's in charge, how we do it, who we do it with, and how seriously we take our responsibilities for protecting America.
Book Description
The Fast Forward MBA in Technology Management brings you the information you need when you need it most-now! This practical, easy-to-use guide gives you instant access to the cutting-edge ideas and hard-won wisdom of one of today's leading experts on information technology (IT). In short, lively segments using real-world examples, it delivers the facts you need to navigate complex IT issues. You'll find brief descriptions of key concepts, tips on real-world applications, compact case studies, perspectives from industry luminaries, and warnings on how to avoid pitfalls. Here are all the tools you need to make technology work for you and your company. Find out:
* Which technologies are most important in running a business today
* How to manage the use and direction of your company's technology choices
* Ways to measure workplace performance with IT
* How leading companies use and manage technology
* And much more
The Portable MBA From the creators of the bestselling Portable MBA series comes The Fast Forward MBA.
* A quick way to brush up on new ideas
* An easy-to-use format that fits in any briefcase
* Real-world information that you can put to use now!
People * Technology * Capital Upside www.upside.com
Customer Reviews:
Is Technology only IT?.......2005-08-02
This book is a mixture of interviews (that are quite interesting) and insight (that is too thinly explained and mostly concerns IT companies). The book IS of small size and easily portable, which seems to be the main promise, and it says it includes quick tips (it delivers, some), but also speedy solutions (doesn't deliver, because they don't exist, and most of the explanations and case studies are too short and superficial for anything to be learned from them) and cutting-edge ideas (for one business only). Suffices as a series of facts and listing of interesting company names, but not much help for a practitioner, and for a MBA degree a student would need many many many more books.
Business focus, brief and filled with points to ponder.......2001-03-11
This wonderful little book covers a wide range of topics in 240 pages. It is a series of short essays, interviews with industry movers and shakers, and articles by different authors.
The central theme is the business value of technology and how business can harness technology to achieve strategic and tactical goals. Indeed, the first two chapters, The Value of Technology to Business and Managing Your Business with Technology, set the tone. These are followed by chapters that address slices of technology management.
People and Technology, Chapter 3, is the least focused because of the array of topics that are addressed. It covers everything from business roles and responsibilities to the need for corporate policies for e-mail. Included are four case studies of "Stellar Performers" that give best practices. The authors manage to cram this all into 28 pages. They also manage to convey a lot of good information - no mean feat considering the range of topics covered and the page count allotted to each.
Chapter 4, Role of Information Technology, is too short and the material would have been more effective had it been combined with the previous chapter.
Things pick up starting with Chapter 5, which provides excellent advice and food for thought on vendor management. This chapter covers everything from vendor evaluation and selection to relationship management. Each topic is quickly covered, but there are a lot of valuable points made by the contributing authors.
My favorite chapter, 6, covers best practices in technology management. I discovered something new or rediscovered something I knew but forgot in each article, essay and case study.
The final chapter, Emerging Technologies: A Manager's Three Year Plan, is a quick breeze through technology and issues of which managers on the technology and business sides of a company need to be aware (and address). Some of the better articles address information security, data warehousing and java. While these are standard fare, this chapter also addresses subtle issues such as recruiting java developers.
The appendix, titled Measuring Workplace Performance with IT, is a quick read that should have been expanded into a chapter. This was my second favorite part of the book and I hated to see it end.
I obviously like the book and recommend it to business process owners and IT technical experts who aspire to management positions. I gave the book four stars instead of five because some of the material is dated. Specifically, many of the interviews with industry leaders reflect their view and opinions cica 1998 - things change too quickly and it shows in these areas. However, this book is filled with timeless, sound advice, which makes reading it a productive way to spend an evening or lazy weekend afternoon.
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Organizations as Learning Systems: "Living Composition" as an Enabling Infrastructure (Advanced Series in Management)
Marjatta Maula
Manufacturer: Elsevier Science
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ASIN: 0080439195 |
Book Description
The main contribution of this book is the living composition, the model of living organizations. It is a new and original interpretation of the theory of living, self-producing systems (autopoiesis theory). Living composition is defined here as strategic components and their relationships. A living organization is thereby a self-producing system that is composed of ten different non-physical strategic components that are continually produced by the organization itself. The components and their relationships are defined so that they enable and facilitate interconnected openness and closure, i.e. the 'sensing' (interactive openness) and 'memory' (self-referentiality) of an organization. These characteristics and related knowledge flows enable the capability to learn and co-evolve with the broader business ecosystem. This book also presents consistency/intentionality platforms and evolution models that help to evaluate the learning and renewal capability of an organization and to improve its enabling infrastructure.
The living composition model has multiple implications for managers, consultants, and academics. It helps to identify the characteristics and development potential of the enabling structures of an organization, and to evaluate various development methods and activities in a larger framework. The sources of organizational learning and renewal are diverse and difficult to understand. This book shows how organizational learning and renewal can be explained by the theory of self-producing systems.
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Information Technology, Organizations and People (Routledge Advances in Management and Business Studies, 6)
Jeff Watkins
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415181658 |
Book Description
This wide-ranging study presents in-depth research into the effect of new information technologies on organizational structure, assesses their progress towards transformation and describes the changes they are making to long-established business processes, roles, cultures and working practices.
Book Description
This book considers the process of impact assessment and shows how and why it needs to be integrated into all stages of development programs - from planning to evaluation. Its basic premise is that impact assessment should not refer to the immediate outputs of a project or program, but to any lasting or significant changes that it brought about.
From a theoretical overview, the book moves on to discuss the design of impact-assessment processes and a range of tools and methods, before illustrating its use in development, in emergencies, and in advocacy work. It ends by exploring ways in which different organizations have attempted to instititutionalize impact-assessment processes and the challenges they have faced in doing so.
In-depth case studies by partner organizations of Oxfam and Novib as well as by some Oxfam staff show how a variety of approaches to impact assessment - qualitative, quantitative, and participatory - in a range of situations from large-scale integrated development programs to projects involving only one community. These include impact studies undertaken by BRAC and PROSHIKA in Bangladesh, the evaluation of a post-conflict rehabilitation program in El Salvador, a long-term study of the effectiveness of environmental projects in Zimbabwe, and a retrospective review of a neighborhood project in the UK.
Product Description
One of the most common types of agreements utilized by professionals in the information technology industry is the Professional Services Agreement, also often referred to as a Consulting Services Agreement or Master Services Agreement. These agreements are used by a wide variety of service providers in the IT arena, including consultants, independent software developers, Web site developers, systems integrators, and other IT specialists. Some Professional Services Agreements provide for a consultant to provide to its client various development, integration and/or implementation services in connection with one or more client projects. Other Professional Services Agreements call for the consultant to prepare and install software and related documentation. Still other Professional Services Agreements have a much less structured format and call for the provision of mere consultation and little more. By whatever name, these Professional Service Agreements typicall! y contain the framework for the provision of services by independent contractor vendors to their clients. In Information Technology Consulting and Professional Services Agreements: Line by Line, leading technology lawyer David A. Gurwin, Esq. presents and analyzes template agreements from both the client's and consultant's perspectives. This book is designed to allow both service providers and prospective purchasers of such services to understand the issues typically involved with Professional Services Agreements, as well as the rationales supporting the positions typically taken by the parties in the course of negotiating such agreements. In addition to explaining in detail the critical differences between the two templates, Mr. Gurwin also discusses which points are most heavily negotiated and the arguments often made by the parties in support of their positions. Whether you are an IT services provider or a party seeking to engage the services of such a provider, being! armed with this "inside" knowledge will help to level the playing field during the negotiation of the Professional Services Agreement.
Customer Reviews:
A Great How-To Guide for the Generalist.......2005-06-23
With the technological advances of the past 10 years, technology consulting services have become much more common. These services are provided under contracts that may be unfamiliar to those who do not practice in the field regularly. David Gurwin has given those generalists a great guide to such contracts, with helpful commentary for those lawyer representing either the service provider, or the service consumer.
This book will also be of interest to contract administrators, paralegals and non-legal professionals. Mr. Gurwin writes in an easy, fluid manner that does not require a law degree to understand.
Average customer rating:
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Change Management in Information Services
Lyndon Pugh
Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Organizational Behavior
| Business & Investing
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Library Management
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General
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| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
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ASIN: 0754646653 |
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Achieving Change Through Training & Development (Library Association Training Guide)
June Whetherly
Manufacturer: Library Association Publishing (UK)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Library Management
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ASIN: 1856042561 |
Books:
- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology
- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology
- Six Sigma for IT Management
- Software Asset Management (It Infrastructure Library Services)
- Stop Sitting on Your Assets: How to Safely Leverage the Equity Trapped in Your Home and Transform It Into a Constant Flow of Wealth and Security
- Strategic Fund Development, 2nd Edition: Building Profitable Relationships That Last (Aspen's Fund Raising Series for the 21st Century)
- Strategic Fund Development, 2nd Edition: Building Profitable Relationships That Last (Aspen's Fund Raising Series for the 21st Century)
- Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide to Strengthening and Sustaining Organizational Achievement, 3rd Edition
- Talking Back to OCD: The Program That Helps Kids and Teens Say "No Way" -- and Parents Say "Way to Go"
- Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning
Books Index
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