Book Review: The Power to Predict

I recently read The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition by Vivek Ranadive (CEO of Tibco). As I read it I made copious notes in it, as is my wont,...

Book Review: IT Risk

I was lucky enough to get a pre-release copy of IT Risk: Turning Business Threats into Competitive Advantage by George Westerman and Richard Hunter. The book approaches IT risk not as a technical issue but as a business and management...

Book Review: The Black Swan

I have just finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable . NNT (as he calls himself) has some fascinating points and some interesting turns of phrase, though he does rather go...

Book Review: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense

On the plane over I finished Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. This excellent book lays out why and how companies fail to drive their business based on evidence,...

Book Review: The Enterprise Unified Process

I have just read (skimmed, really) Scott Ambler's book The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process . If you are using the Rational Unified Process (from IBM), or considering doing so, and worried about applying it to a...

Book Review: Refactoring Databases

Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage wrote Refactoring Databases, they say, "to share their experiences and techniques at evolving database schemas via refactoring". The book, particularly in the thorough list of refactorings detailed in later chapters, reveals them to be experienced...

Book Review - Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough

I have just finished Jonathan Tisch's book Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience.The author is Loews Hotels chairman and CEO and is clearly very knowledgeable about the customer experience and how to improve it. The book...

Book Review: Real-Life MDA

I recently read Michael Guttman and John Parodi's book "Real-Life MDA". The book talks about MDA (Model Driven Architecture) not from a theoretical point of view but using 7 case studies where MDA was used successfully. I liked the idea...

Book Review - The Halo Effect

I just finished reading Phil Rosenzweig's book "The Halo Effect...and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers". This book takes aim at the general run of business books and, in particular, their tendency to dress up vivid stories as...

Book Review: Business Rules Management and Service-Oriented Architecture

Ian Graeme's new book "Business Rules Management and Service-Oriented Architecture" is a fairly technical look at business rules, the technology of a business rules management system and patterns of using them. The book gives a fairly quick overview of SOA...