Books

Books --------------------

Workflow and Business Processes

Workflow Handbook 2004

The Workflow Management Coalition provides an important forum for the adoption of standards throughout the industry. Standards provide an infrastructure for inter-organizational business process automation and management. In this book, industry experts and thought leaders present significant new ideas and concepts to help you plan a successful future for your organization.

Business Value

The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers

According to this turgid volume of business metaphysics, dwindling profit margins caused by intensified competition, a glut of commodity production and knowledgeable, web-empowered consumers will usher in "a new industrial system" characterized by "co-creating value through personalized experiences unique to the individual consumer." Under the new regime, headstrong consumers will "seek to exercise their influence in every part of the business system," and companies will accommodate them by, for example, allowing them to design their own individualized cosmetics and houseboats (an innovation whose benefits include "emotional bonding with... the company" and "a greater degree of self-esteem"). Rather than simply selling their products and services, companies will design "experience environments" that comfort the consumer in any contingency, such as General Motors' On-Star satellite communications system, which can summon help after an accident, open the car doors if the driver is locked out and direct motorists to the nearest Italian restaurant. Beneath the avant-garde terminology, the book mostly boils down to a medley of strategies to make business more consumer-friendly, like flexible pricing schemes, electronic gadgets that are easy to use instead of baffling, options and add-ons, meticulous market research and lavish customer service and support. But business professors Ramaswamy and Prahalad, coauthor of Competing for the Future, inflate this rather familiar "customer-is-king" approach to a level of abstraction and mystification-the health-care industry, for instance, is actually "a complex, evolving wellness space"-that is needlessly opaque and portentous. Managers who thought their job was to make or do something that people might want to buy will be scratching their heads over this book.

EPSS/PCD

EPSS Revisited: A Lifecycle for Developing Performance-Centered Systems

by Gary J. Dickelman (Editor)

EPSS Revisited is an essential reader for students and practitioners of performance-centered design (PCD). Its chapters support each element of the performance-centered systems development lifecycle. From job aids and "bolt on" EPSS to ground-up enterprise performance-centered systems, the reader will find gems in terms of methodology, industry trends, and a plethora of real-world examples of PCD. Practitioners of the constituent disciplines - cognitive science, instructional systems development, user-centered design, total quality management, and software engineering - will discover where their practices merge and overlap with PCD.

Management

What's the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best New Management Thinking

by Tom Davenport

Change management. Reengineering. Knowledge management. Major new management ideas are thrown at today's companies with increasing frequency-and each comes with evangelizing gurus and eager-to-assist implementation consultants. Only a handful of these ideas will be a good fit for your organization. Choose the right idea at the right time and your company can become more efficient, more effective, and more innovative. Choose the wrong one-or jump on the right bandwagon too late-and your company could fall hopelessly behind. Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak say that some managers have found ways to improve their odds of success in the risky but essential game of idea management. In What's the Big Idea?, they introduce a largely unsung class of managers they call-idea practitioners-individuals who do the real work of importing and implementing new ideas into businesses. While gurus reap most of the credit when big ideas take flight, Davenport and Prusak's research reveals that idea practitioners actually play the most important role: They turn the right ideas into action.