Book Description
Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS), a way to simulate a large number of choices by individual actors, is one of the most exciting practical developments in business modeling since the invention of relational databases. It represents a new way to understand data and generate information that has never been available before--a way for businesses to view the future and to understand and anticipate the likely effects of their decisions on their markets and industries. It thus promises to have far-reaching effects on the way that businesses in many areas use computers to support practical decision-making. Managing Business Complexity is the first complete business-oriented agent-based modeling and simulation resource. It has three purposes: first, to teach readers how to think about ABMS, that is, about agents and their interactions; second, to teach readers how to explain the features and advantages of ABMS to other people and third, to teach readers how to actually implement ABMS by building agent-based simulations. It is intended to be a complete ABMS resource, accessible to readers who haven't had any previous experience in building agent-based simulations, or any other kinds of models, for that matter. It is also a collection of ABMS business applications resources, all assembled in one place for the first time. In short, Managing Business Complexity addresses who needs ABMS and why, where and when ABMS can be applied to the everyday business problems that surround us, and how specifically to build these powerful agent-based models.
Customer Reviews:
Great start to bridge insights from complexity science into business applications.......2007-04-16
'Managing Business Complexity' is a great start at bridging the significant academic work in complexity science over recent years to business applications. It provides an introduction to agent-based simulations and an overview of the characteristics and advantages of agents, and walks the reader through two illustrative examples. Such examples are especially helpful to readers with little or no previous experience using agent-based models.
Applications of complexity science to business are still in their infancy. As such, the discussion in the book leans towards the academic, and more pointedly towards programmers rather than business practitioners with scant scientific background. Future editions of this book might benefit from including further business applications, and including the impact to bottom line.
This book is highly recommended as an overview of this exciting subject and its applicability to business situations.
Average customer rating:
- Future trends in knowledge work.
- An Organisation made of Knowledge Work Teams
- I'll take responsibility over intelligence any time.
- Real Knowledge About Knowledge Worker Teams
|
The Distributed Mind: Achieving High Performance Through the Collective Intelligence of Knowledge Work Teams
Kimball Fisher , and
Mareen Duncan Fisher
Manufacturer: AMACOM
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Workplace
| Organizational Behavior
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Human Resources & Personnel Management
| Industries & Professions
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Decision-Making & Problem Solving
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Management
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Motivational
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Entrepreneurship
| Small Business & Entrepreneurship
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Information Systems
| Software Engineering
| Computer Science
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
The Distance Manager: A Hands On Guide to Managing Off-Site Employees and Virtual Teams
ASIN: 0814403670 |
Book Description
For the first time in history, more employees work with their minds than with their muscles. Their value lies in their mental abilities and their knowledge. Collectively, they are the "mind" of the company -- a mind spread across many individual brains. The authors of this breakthrough book call it "the distributed mind."
The distributed mind is a powerful force, for if two heads are better than one, imagine how much better 20 heads are -- if it is possible to manage them all! That's the fascinating subject of this book: how progressive companies are creating teams of "knowledge workers" and coordinating their individual efforts into a web of high performance.
Using interviews they conducted with hundreds of knowledge workers, the Fishers have identified six trends that will change forever the way we work. The Distributed Mind provides an intriguing look at how to:
*understand the characteristics of knowledge work teams (and the innovative concept of "vertical multiskilling")
* organize multiple specialists into a cohesive unit
* share knowledge without creating information overload * coordinate activities when half the team is spread across the globe (or never in the office)
* understand the critical role of technology in this new work structure
* grasp a whole new organizational form, called "the learning lattice"
The Fishers point out that "knowledge workers" aren't just engineers, lawyers, and programmers. They can be found on the assembly line, as well. It's a new world of work for all!
Customer Reviews:
Future trends in knowledge work........2000-08-10
"This is the age of knowledge work. It is the age of the smart worker. The operations that learn the secret of tapping into this knowledge will always outperform those that do not. Those that master the 'collective intelligence' of knowledge work teams will be the architects of the future...As individuals, knowledge workers are smart people. But their individual effectiveness is amplified when they are also part of a smart organization. As an effective knowledge team, they can often create a sort of synergy where the outcome of the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts. These smart teams appear as though all team members are of a common mind that shares information and ideas seamlessly across the membership-a distributed mind...This book is about knowledge work teams. Knowledge work requires a special set of skills related to an area of expertise, such as those of an engineer, a salesperson, a consultant, a manager, or a health-care professional. But it requires much more than technical competence to be successful as a knowledge worker" (from the Introduction).
In this context, Kimball Fisher and Mareen Duncan Fisher:
* define knowledge work by comparing five characteristics that differ for physical and knowledge work as follows:
- Job Characteristics: (1). Core task, (2). Critical skills, (3). Work process, (4). Work outcome, (5). Knowledge used.
- Job Characteristics of Physical Work: (1). Doing, (2). Physical, (3). Usually linear, (4). Product, (5). Applied.
- Job Characteristics of Knowledge Work: (1). Thinking, (2). Mental, (3). Usually nonlinear, (4). Information, (5). Created.
* argue that "the nature of work is changing from mostly linear to mostly nonlinear and from requiring mainly physical skills to requiring mainly mental acuity. Jobs now usually produce more information than product and require more improvisation than rote, automatic application of process. While this trend is dramatic in a few cases, for most of us the change has been a slow, steady evolution of our jobs", and illustrate this trend.
* show how teams and team-based operations differ from groups and non-team-based operations, and illustrate how these teams differ from the traditional organizations by comparing hierarchical organizations with team-based organizations as follows:
- Hierarchical Organization: hierarchical order, local optimum, maximum specification, functional defect control, specialized skill, vertical information flow, work ethic value, and conservative improvement.
- Team-Based Organization: information order, global optimum, minimum critical specification, source defect control, multiskilled, source information flow, work life value, and continuous improvement.
* illustrate the differences between physical and knowledge work teams by comparing typical physical work teams with knowledge work teams.
- Typical Physical Work Teams: physical labor, multiple generalists, inside single organization, fairly stable membership, and repetitive responsibilities.
- Typical Knowledge Work Teams: mental labor, multiple specialists, across multiple organizations, shifting membership, and single-purpose responsibilities.
* explore the process of knowledge work design, and illustrate the characteristics of evolving organizational form-learning lattice organization.
* discuss the metaphors and practices needed to create successful knowledge teams.
* argue that "environmental shifts and changes in organizational capabilities have created opportunities and need for virtual knowledge teams in contemporary organizations. To effectively create, utilize, and support VKT's, we must focus more attention on the VKT challenges", and then discuss the challenges of making VKTs effective.
* discuss fostering innovation and creativity as a critical challenge for knowledge work.
* discuss what is becoming a critical attribute of effective knowledge work teams: the ability to transfer knowledge effectively without causing information overload.
* discuss the role of leaders in knowledge teams, and argue that "in knowledge work teams, team leadership is critical. Although this formal leadership is often shared or rotated, we believe it must be done properly for the team to be effective".
* discuss a number of practical tips to prevent illness in teams, including providing team training, integrating new team members, setting goals and measuring results, understanding group decision-making processes, managing team conflict, building team communication skills, giving and receiving feedback, defining team members' roles and responsibilities, developing operating guidelines, and creating a team charter.
* explore how technology aids knowledge work, and argue that "technologies must be appropriately integrated into the organization if they are to benefit knowledge teams. Three particular problems to avoid are technology misuse, expecting more from technology than it can reasonably deliver, and serving technology instead of having technology serve the team".
* discuss future trends in knowledge work by illustrating six key work trends for the new millennium: (1). automation of physical work, (2). elimination of traditional jobs and work structures, (3). empowered knowledge workers, (4). knowledge work teams predominant, (5). workplace flexibility, (6). more virtual knowledge teams.
Strongly recommended.
An Organisation made of Knowledge Work Teams.......2000-08-02
The T-word, team, has been badly devaluated during the last few years. People talk about teams without really understanding, what they actually are about. No wonder some people react with cynicism when their CEO returns from a training seminary with the word Team on his lips.
There is a solid case for this book that addresses teams, especially knowledge work teams from a practical no-nonsense perspective. This book makes good reading not only for knowledge work team builders but also for the people that actually make up the teams. The language and structure is exceptionally readable and the issues are easy to grasp. Someone might even say that Fishers use too many cases to justify their points. Fishers start with discussing knowledge work, then teams and finally knowledge work teams and finally building a working organisation made of knowledge work teams.
Fishers do not limit their perspective to teams and organisations but discuss also their influences to societies and individuals. Teams do not work in a vacuum but change the way people work and think and live their lives.
The one thing that I disagree with is they way Fishers create an artificial (in my opinion) distinction between physical work and knowledge work, and the consequent physical work teams and knowledge work teams. Fishers stress the point that even knowledge workers do physical work and physical workers do knowledge work, but within their definition of knowledge work!
I'll take responsibility over intelligence any time........2000-04-29
This is a book on Knowledge Workers, and on business management, actually. It does discuss industrial age and post-industrial age workers, but it's not so much about industry, industrial workers, and modern factory automation.
The sense I came away with is that the aim of the authors was on making work teams more effective. However, for me, the book gets back to a more fundamental issue, the possibility of effectively eliminating levels of management in any organization. This is done not just by eliminating some staff, and giving the remaining staff communications. On a superficial level, automation of information access and communications for today's knowledge workers is required. However, on a more fundamental level, this is done by the assumption of a greater degree of the responsibilities by Knowledge Workers.
The book does get to the nub of flat (empowerment) versus hierarchical (delegation) management styles, which has come about with downsizing and the advent of empowered workers. It discusses how to manage processes and people with fewer managers, by enabling them to gather and use information and make decisions. Most importantly, it prioritizes: responsibility, empowerment, the management of processes, the management of people, management styles, downsizing, and information sharing. They all go together, but some of these are ends, and others are only means to an end. Further, some of these means to an end are prerequisites and others are only facilitators.
Whether tasks are delegated one-at-a-time to individuals (hierarchical), or projects and processes are turned over to a work-team (flat), in both cases communications is required. However, the differences today, are that Knowledge Workers in empowered organizations: are on multiple teams, not having just one job to do; must communicate with all team members, not just with supervisor and immediate coworkers; are responsible for the entire job, not just for one aspect of it.
Without proper orientation by management, Knowledge Workers in empowered work teams can remain focused on technical skill development or on information sharing, as ends unto themselves, or on doing their narrow tasks. What could be missing is a focus on the success of the process or project, and on the achievement on the goals of the organization. In the absence of middle managers, whose job it was to not only manage workers, departments, and processes, but also to focus on the goals of the larger organization, empowered Knowledge Workers must assume a large share of these responsibilities.
Team members must understand firstly, that responsibilities have been thrust upon them, and secondly, how to carry out these responsibilities as a self-directed work team. Today, we're not just providing communications systems to workers. We are holding people responsible, and therefore we're providing them with communications systems.
Real Knowledge About Knowledge Worker Teams.......1998-05-29
The husband-and wife team of Kimball and Mareen Duncan Fisher have collaborated to produce a well-documented, stimulating and useful book on what they call the "distributed mind", or knowledge workers who are geographically and/or organizationally dispersed. The Fishers have been involved in business process redesign for many years, and they have poured their comprehensive lessons learned into this 277-page volume.
One of their most important contributions that they deliver early in the book is to demystify the term "knowledge worker" by explaining that very few knowledge workers do only knowledge work and very few physical laborers do only physical work. This is a liberating insight, because it expands the potential applicability of their later discussions on how knowledge work is important in factories as well as R & D labs.
The Fishers use the term "the learning lattice" to describe an approach to redesigning knowledge work that explains how teams can be organized to take advantage of both units composed of functional experts (skill development teams) and cross-functional teams (business teams), optimizing the knowledge, perspectives and contributions of all concerned. Some organizations call these newly emerging learning lattices "centers of excellence".
Both of the Fishers started their careers in the art world, it is not surprising to see that they have some intriguing comments about harnessing creativity in organizations. They argue that creativity is a social activity, not a guru-centered process that requires isolation. Citing a 1993 survey done ! by the Center for the Study of Work Teams at the University of North Texas, research showed that knowledge workers prefer collaborative team environments, where there is an opportunity to share ideas and solutions.
How about leadership of knowledge workers? The Fishers suggest that this is not an easy task and that the leader's role is handled best through a boundary manager role. They identify seven key attributes for the "distributed leader", including articulating a vision for the organization, managing by principles rather than policies, and effectively coaching and communicating. They provide specific recommendations for ways to "infuse energy and wellness" into organizations through better understanding of roles and responsibilities, effectively managing--rather than suppressing--conflict, and orienting and developing knowledge worker teams.
The Distributed Mind is a great new tool for those who are interested in building community in organizations.
Book Description
Technological advances and changes in the global economy are increasing the geographic distribution of work in industries as diverse as banking, wine production, and clothing design. Many workers communicate regularly with distant coworkers; some monitor and manipulate tools and objects at a distance. Work teams are spread across different cities or countries. Joint ventures and multiorganizational projects entail work in many locations. Two famous examples--the Hudson Bay Company's seventeenth-century fur trading empire and the electronic community that created the original Linux computer operating system--suggest that distributed work arrangements can be flexible, innovative, and highly successful. At the same time, distributed work complicates workers' professional and personal lives. Distributed work alters how people communicate and how they organize themselves and their work, and it changes the nature of employee-employer relationships.
This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of distributed work groups and organizations, the challenges inherent in distributed work, and ways to make distributed work more effective. Specific topics include division of labor, incentives, managing group members, facilitating interaction among distant workers, and monitoring performance. The final chapters focus on distributed work in one domain, collaborative scientific research. The contributors include psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, and computer scientists.
Customer Reviews:
Face-to-Face versus On-Line Work.......2002-08-06
"The Place of Face-to-Face Communication in Distributed Work"
Bonnie A. Nardi, Agilent Technologies; Steve Whittaker, AT&T Labs-Research
This chapter is significant. There is a wealth of knowledge and understanding that can be brought to on-line business collaboration from fields like anthropology. This is particularly important given the notable failure of many on-line collaboration efforts.
What intrigues me about the work are the larger questions that emerge - what does this mean for the meaning and quality of business life, the effectiveness of on-line work, work/life balance, alienation/mental health, etc. For example, what will the quality of our ideas be like is we work more and more on-line? If we work in isolated, on-line environments how does this impact our need to "be" as social beings and learn informally with others around the coffee pot? What if the on-line "coffee pot" can never be as rich as the real thing?
Book Description
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the joint International Workshops on Trading Agent Design and Analysis, TADA 2006, and on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce, AMEC VIII 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, in May 2006 as an associated event of AAMAS 2006, the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from the presentations made at the workshop and include papers from the annual TAC tournament whose purpose is to stimulate research in trading agents and market mechanisms by providing a platform for agents competing in well-defined market scenarios. The papers address a mix of both theoretical and practical issues in trading agent design and technologies, theoretical and empirical evaluation of strategies in complex trading scenarios as well as mechanism design. Also covered are issues of agent-mediated electronic commerce ranging from the design of electronic marketplaces and efficient protocols to behavioral aspects of agents operating in such environments.
Book Description
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, AMEC VII 2005, held in Utrecht, Netherlands in July 2005, as part of AAMAS 2005, and the third Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis, TADA 2005, held in Edinburgh, UK in August 2005, in the course of the IJCAI 2005 conference meetings.
The 7 revised full AMEC 2005 papers presented were carefully selected and address a mix of both theoretical and practical issues, looking at behavioral and organizational dimensions of agent-mediated electronic commerce as well as at complex computational, information and system-level challenges. An extended version of an article originally presented at AMEC 2004 has also been included. The second part of the book comprises 8 revised full papers of TADA 2005 that focus on trading agent technologies and mechanism design, including discussions of agent architectures and decision-making algorithms along with theoretical analyses and empirical evaluations of agent strategies in different trading contexts.
Book Description
The theory of argumentation is a rich, interdisciplinary area of research involving philosophy, communications studies, linguistics, psychology, and logics. Its techniques have found a wide range of applications in both theoretical and practical branches of artificial intelligence and computer science. Multi-agent systems theory has picked up argumentation-inspired approaches and specifically argumentation-theoretic results from many different areas. Researchers in argumentation and multi-agent systems are currently enjoying a unique opportunity to integrate the various understandings of argument into a coherent and core part of the functioning of autonomous computational systems.
This book originates from the First International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems, ArgMAS 2004, held in New York, NY, USA in July 2004. Besides 12 selected revised full papers taken from the workshop, 4 additional papers by key people in the area round off overall coverage of the relevant topics. The papers address the following main topics: foundations of dialogues, belief revision, persuasion and deliberation, negotiation, and strategic issues.
Book Description
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems held in Utrecht, Netherlands in July 2005 as an associated event of AAMAS 2005, the main international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.
The 10 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations, negotiation, protocols, deliberation and coalition formation, and consensus formation.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Computers and Operations Research, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
This study presents a new solution procedure for multiple objective programming (MOP). It applies the concept of the normal boundary intersection (NBI) within the framework of the interactive weighted Tchebycheff procedure (IWTP). The proposed procedure is a collaborative approach to overcome the weak points inherent in both the NBI method and IWTP. In order to control the solution procedure of pinpointing a final solution properly, we parameterized the Pareto-frontier via a set of reference point vectors based on the convex hull of individual maxima (CHIM) instead of using the varying weights of each objective. Using well-distributed reference point vectors, we could identify well-distributed Pareto-optimal solutions, thereby eliminating the IWTP filtering stages and reducing the chance of missing the best compromise solution from the decision maker (DM)'s utility point of view. Moreover, by working with a sequence of progressively smaller subsets of reference point vectors, the DM can identify a final solution at earlier stages than with the IWTP.
Average customer rating:
|
Client / Server: A Manager's Guide
Shafe
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Decision-Making & Problem Solving
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Client-Server Systems
| Data in the Enterprise
| Networking
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
LAN
| Networks, Protocols & APIs
| Networking
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Networks, Protocols & APIs
| Networking
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Software
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
| Business
| Databases
| Directories
| E-mail
| General
| Introductory Guides
| Mathematical & Statistical
| Natural Language Processing
| Optical Character Recognition
| Personal Finance
| Spreadsheets
| Voice Recognition
| Word Processors & Editors
General
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Operating Systems
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Mathematics
| Professional Science
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
| Applied
| Chaos & Systems
| Geometry & Topology
| Mathematical Analysis
| Mathematical Physics
| Number Systems
| Pure Mathematics
| Transformations
| Trigonometry
ASIN: 0201427907 |
Average customer rating:
|
Data Management in a Connected World: Essays Dedicated to Hartmut Wedekind on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Decision-Making & Problem Solving
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Distributed Databases
| Databases
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Databases
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Client-Server Systems
| Data in the Enterprise
| Networking
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Networks, Protocols & APIs
| Networking
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Software Development
| Software Design, Testing & Engineering
| Programming
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Workflow
| Business
| Software
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Web Services
| Web Development
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
All Amazon Upgrade
| Amazon Upgrade
| Stores
| Books
Business & Investing
| Amazon Upgrade
| Stores
| Books
Computers & Internet
| Amazon Upgrade
| Stores
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Business & Investing
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Computers & Internet
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
ASIN: 3540262954 |
Book Description
The role of data management becomes more and more crucial in a totally connected world. Having the right data at the right time at the right place is therefore one of the most challenging research issues we face in the coming years. This Festschrift volume is devoted to Hartmut Wedekind on the occasion of his 70th birthday and comprises a total of 18 articles discussing a broad spectrum of issues related to data management. All articles are (co-)authored by academic children and grandchildren of Hartmut Wedekind and therefore reflect the multifaceted selection of academic topics that he explored, discussed, and published on during his academic life.
All articles are clustered into four different parts, focusing on motivation and modeling issues, infrastructural services, application design, and finally different applications. The scope of the articles reaches from visionary illustrations of data management in a connected world through core database techniques in the context of database caching, notification services, etc., to the design and description of data-intensive applications.
Books:
- Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics)
- Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics)
- Mastering the Requirements Process (2nd Edition)
- Microsoft Office Project 2003 Step by Step
- Occupational Outlook Handbook 2006- 2007 (Occupational Outlook Handbook)
- Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company
- Operations Management & Student CD Package (8th Edition)
- Operations Management & Student CD Package (8th Edition)
- Operations Research: Applications and Algorithms (with CD-ROM and InfoTrac®)
- Operations Research Models and Methods
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Too Big for Diapers
- Obsidian Alliances
- Caverns of Night: Coal Mines in Art Literature, and Film
- Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook: Featuring : Fried Green Tomatoes, Southern Barbe
- God of War
- Rachel's Holiday
- National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees: Eastern Region
- Accounting Principles, Chapters 14-27, Electronic Working Papers
- Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus: Gender, Law, And Society
- Gorky Park
Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
Handbook of Computational Economics, Volume 2: Agent-Based Computational Economics (Handbook of Computational Economics)
The Structure and Dynamics of Networks: (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life
![A CHIM-based interactive Tchebycheff procedure for multiple objective decision making [An article from: Computers and Operations Research]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21KKZWND0YL.jpg)