Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

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...

Book Review: Competing on Analytics

I have just finished a pre-release copy of "Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning" by Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris Tom and Jeanne have written a new book (building on a paper they wrote some time ago) about...

Book Review: Smartsourcing

I just finished Tom Koulopoulos's book Smartsourcing - Driving Innovation and Growth Through Outsourcing. I first met Tom when he spoke at a conference I attended and I blogged about his sessions - The Road to Agra and Smartsourcing. He...

Book Reviews: Good to Great, Creative Destruction

Two more book reviews, "Good to Great" and "Creative Destruction" Good to Great first. This book will (probably) terrify you if you work. Clearly outlining critical characteristics of super-successful companies it show over and over again why most companies are...

Book Review: Data Mining Techniques

I am getting caught up on book reviews over the break. Today's is Data Mining Techniques by Berry and Linoff. This is one of the classic works on data mining and well worth the read.I really liked the book both...

Book Review: Execution. The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Over the weekend I finished "Execution. The Discipline of Getting Things Done" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. This book is a succinct summary of all that is wrong in many companies. Larry and Ram analyze many of the most...

Book Review: The World Is Flat

I have just finished reading "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. Firstly a health warning - it's a REALLY long book. Even skimming some sections it took me a long while to read it. Overall it is a good...

Book Review: Making Robust Decisions

I just finished reading Dr David Ullman's new book, "Making Robust Decisions". The book is a discussion of the challenges of making complex decisions, especially those with alternatives and uncertainty, and a methodology/software platform for approaching these kinds of decisions....

Book Review: The Only Sustainable Edge

I recently heard John Hagel (who has a blog) present (at the webMethods conference) on the book he wrote with John Seely Brown, "The only sustainable edge". In the book John and John discuss how recent changes in the world...

Book Review: The Long Tail

I have just finished reading "The Long Tail" in which Chris Anderson does a nice job of introducing some key concepts that are redefining business in the Internet era. As he says "The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in...

Book Review: Knowledge Management

I have been reading this short book on knowledge management, by Carl Frappaolo, on and off since the Delphi Business Process Innovation Summit. The book is a nice introduction to the field of knowledge management offering definitions, some history, various...

Book Review: Semantics in Business Systems

Dave McComb's book is both interesting and depressing - having read it you are amazed any information system ever works! It's a little like reading "The Design of Every Day Things" or "The Mythical Man Month". They are great books...

Book Review: The business rules revolution

I was lucky enough to get pre-release access to Barb von Halle's new book, The Business Rules Revolution, so I thought I would post a review. The book is being published by HappyAbout publishers and you can but it directly...

Book Review: The Joy of SOX

How can you resist a book with a title like "The Joy of SOX"? To give you some idea of the content it is sub-titled "Why Sarbanes-Oxley and Service-Oriented Architecture may be the best thing that ever happened to you"...

Book Review: Blink

This book has been a hot topic recently. I first heard about it at InterACT where Larry Rosenberger used it as part of his discussion on the future of analytics. The book is an easy read and full of wonderful...

Book Review: Integration and SOA

A short book written by Beth Gold-Bernstein and Gary So, it covers the basic concepts, technologies and approaches of integration in the context of SOA. It has some good thoughts on how to build a business case for integration projects...

Book Review: Business Rules Applied

This book is one of the classics on developing information systems with a business rules approach. Not only does the book give a good overview of the key concepts in business rules, it also lays out the core tasks and...

Book Review: The Real-Time Enterprise

This book was recommended to me by Mike Gonzalez over at Hands-on-BI. The book is a couple of years old but its time horizon was fairly long so it is still nicely relevant. The book introduces the concept of a...

Book Review: Principles of the Business Rules Approach

This book is one of the classics on business rules from one of the most long-standing authors in the area, Ron Ross. The book is a little more than three years old but, as it is not really focused on...

Book Review: Use Cases - Requirements in Context

This second edition of the book is on how to gather and define requirements using a process based on use cases. The book outlines an iterative approach to using use cases and adapted and evolved based on real experience of...