Networked, Scaled, and Agile


Book Description

While technology and geopolitical forces change the face of business today, the patterns and challenges of organizing humans to work together across organization, culture, language and time zone boundaries remain. To face these challenges, all organizations need to be agile, networked and scalable. Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how to shape organizations that will enable people to make faster and better decisions in a more complex world. By outlining the tension between the need for agility/differentiation and scale/integration, the book offers a new way to think about this debate using the models of the Tower (vertical integration) and the Square (horizontal integration). It addresses the role of the leadership team and how the organization design process can build C-suite leaders and successors. Each chapter concludes with a series of reflection questions for leaders as well as a summary of key concepts and tips. Including case studies from global organizations, Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how organization design can address three of the biggest business challenges organizations face today: how to build a new capability across the entire enterprise; how to make the entire organization more customer-centric; and how to allow for faster innovation.




Network Design for IP Convergence


Book Description

The emergence of quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms continues to propel the development of real-time multimedia services such as VoIP and videoconferencing. However, many challenges remain in achieving optimized standardization convergence. Network Design for IP Convergence is a comprehensive, global guide to recent advances in IP network implementation. Providing an introduction to basic LAN/WAN/MAN network design, the author covers the latest equipment and architecture, addressing, QoS policies, and integration of services, among other topics. The book explains how to integrate the different layers of reference models and various technological platforms to mirror the harmonization that occurs in the real world of carrier networks. It furnishes appropriate designs for traditional and critical services in the LAN and carrier networks (both MAN and WAN), and it clarifies how a specific layer or technology can cause those services to malfunction. This book lays a foundation for understanding with concepts and applicability of QoS parameters under the multilayer scheme, and a solid explanation of service infrastructure. It goes on to describe integration in both real time and "not real time," elaborating on how both processes can co-exist within the same IP network and concluding with the designs and configurations of service connections. Learn How to Overcome Obstacles to Improve Technology This sweeping analysis of the implementation of IP convergence and QoS mechanisms helps designers and operators get past key obstacles, such as integrating platform layers and technologies and implementing various associated QoS concepts, to improve technology and standards.




Project to Product


Book Description

As tech giants and startups disrupt every market, those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the 21st century, just as the masters of mass production defined the landscape in the 20th. Unfortunately, business and technology leaders are woefully ill-equipped to solve the problems posed by digital transformation. At the current rate of disruption, half of S&P 500 companies will be replaced in the next ten years. A new approach is needed. In Project to Product, Value Stream Network pioneer and technology business leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework—a new way of seeing, measuring, and managing software delivery. The Flow Framework will enable your company’s evolution from project-oriented dinosaur to product-centric innovator that thrives in the Age of Software. If you’re driving your organization’s transformation at any level, this is the book for you.




Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures


Book Description

Motivation Modem enterprises rely on database management systems (DBMS) to collect, store and manage corporate data, which is considered a strategic corporate re source. Recently, with the proliferation of personal computers and departmen tal computing, the trend has been towards the decentralization and distribution of the computing infrastructure, with autonomy and responsibility for data now residing at the departmental and workgroup level of the organization. Users want their data delivered to their desktops, allowing them to incor porate data into their personal databases, spreadsheets, word processing doc uments, and most importantly, into their daily tasks and activities. They want to be able to share their information while retaining control over its access and distribution. There are also pressures from corporate leaders who wish to use information technology as a strategic resource in offering specialized value-added services to customers. Database technology is being used to manage the data associated with corporate processes and activities. Increasingly, the data being managed are not simply formatted tables in relational databases, but all types of ob jects, including unstructured text, images, audio, and video. Thus, the database management providers are being asked to extend the capabilities of DBMS to include object-relational models as well as full object-oriented database man agement systems.




Agile HR


Book Description

In the new world of work, agility is a business imperative. Agile HR is a practical guide written specifically for people professionals on how the HR function can develop agile processes and practices that save time, boost performance and support overall business goals. From small tech start-ups or large traditional companies, organizations need to be fast, flexible and digitally empowered to succeed. However, too many companies are stuck with siloed, compliance-driven HR processes that work in opposition to the business rather than supporting it. This results in the view that HR is slow and out of touch. However, Agile HR shows that this doesn't need to be the case. Covering every aspect of the HR function from people processes, ways of working and HR services to organization design, operating models and HR teams, Agile HR is an essential guide for all HR practitioners wanting to make their HR practices agile and drive business performance but don't know where to start. As well as guidance on how to deal with resistance, manage a backlog and deal with constraints, there is also invaluable guidance on how HR can prioritize effectively and assess which activities to pursue, which to develop, which to rework and which to abandon in order to achieve continuous business improvement. Supported by case studies from organizations who have seen the benefits of an agile approach to HR including Sky Betting & Gaming and MUJI, this is critical reading for all HR professionals in organizations of any size needing to adopt fast, flexible and evolving agile approaches to effectively compete in the new world of work.




The Agile Organisation


Book Description




Agility Shift


Book Description

As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.




Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation


Book Description

Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation is an in-depth look at transforming businesses so they are fit for purpose in a digitally enabled world. It is a guide for all those needing to better understand, implement and lead digital transformation in the workplace. It sets aside traditional thinking and outdated strategies to explain what steps need to be taken for an organization to become truly agile. It addresses how to build organizational velocity and establish iterative working, remove unnecessary process, embed innovation, map strategy to motivation and develop talent to succeed. Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation provides guidance on how to set the pace and frequency for change and shows how to break old habits and reform the behaviours of a workforce to embed digital transformation, achieve organizational agility and ensure high performance. Full of practical advice, examples and real-life insights from organizational development professionals at the leading edge of digital transformation, this book is an essential guide to building an agile business.




Organization Design


Book Description

A well-designed organization is an effective organization. Decisions about organization design determine the shape and form of the organization – not only the reporting structure and authority relations, but also the number and size of sub-units and the interfaces between the sub-units. Indirectly, such decisions affect individual productivity as well as the organization’s ability to attain strategic goals. Organization Design equips the reader with advanced tools and frameworks, based on both research and practical experience, for understanding and re-designing organisations. Particular emphasis is placed on how one can improve effectiveness by simplifying complex roles, processes, and structures. This updated second edition includes a new chapter about traditional organizational forms, and is complemented by a companion website. Students will find thorough conceptual explanations combined with case studies from different industries. This textbook will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners.




Feedback Systems


Book Description

The essential introduction to the principles and applications of feedback systems—now fully revised and expanded This textbook covers the mathematics needed to model, analyze, and design feedback systems. Now more user-friendly than ever, this revised and expanded edition of Feedback Systems is a one-volume resource for students and researchers in mathematics and engineering. It has applications across a range of disciplines that utilize feedback in physical, biological, information, and economic systems. Karl Åström and Richard Murray use techniques from physics, computer science, and operations research to introduce control-oriented modeling. They begin with state space tools for analysis and design, including stability of solutions, Lyapunov functions, reachability, state feedback observability, and estimators. The matrix exponential plays a central role in the analysis of linear control systems, allowing a concise development of many of the key concepts for this class of models. Åström and Murray then develop and explain tools in the frequency domain, including transfer functions, Nyquist analysis, PID control, frequency domain design, and robustness. Features a new chapter on design principles and tools, illustrating the types of problems that can be solved using feedback Includes a new chapter on fundamental limits and new material on the Routh-Hurwitz criterion and root locus plots Provides exercises at the end of every chapter Comes with an electronic solutions manual An ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate students Indispensable for researchers seeking a self-contained resource on control theory