A small book of deep insight, Virtual Ops Private Cloud tackles the why and how of moving enterprise IT from virtualization to private cloud. Private cloud—better tailored, less costly, more secure than public cloud—means automation, dynamic workload management, and a…
In general, I found this book disappointing. Dan Remenyi does a good job of explaining the importance of business cases and the elements that should get included within a business case, but he falls short on the harder task of…
In their book Making Technology Investments Profitable: ROI Road Map to Better Business Cases, Jack M. Keen and Bonnie Digrius make the case for business cases, walk through the process of creating a business case, provide insights for finding and…
I hear the term ROI often enough but rarely see it calculated. It is said that business is all about numbers– financial statements, stock prices, bonus plans–but then there are IT projects, with budgets that are clear enough (or at…
I’ve been reading a couple of good books on taxonomy: Darin L. Stewart’s Building Enterprise Taxonomies and Patrick Lambe’s Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness. Stewart’s book is a good introduction. Lambe’s delves deeply into the topic and has…
I’ve recently read and want to recommend Douglas W. Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business (2007). The book’s central premise is that anything can be measured and that any measurement, even a very imperfect…
In Innovation to the Core, Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson explain how organizations achieve ongoing innovation by building up an organization-wide, systemic innovation capability. The “to the core” of the title implies that the effort must touch every aspect of…
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. –John Muir I’ve recently re-read Improving Performance and thought I’d share my enthusiasm for the book. Starting with the quote above,…
Jim Downey 