From the category archives:

Book Reviews

Book Review – Analytics at Work

January 26, 2010

I received a pre-release copy of Tom Davenport’s new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. The book is a follow-on to Competing on Analytics (reviewed here) and is a shorter, pithier book than its predecessor. Once again Tom collaborates with Jeanne Harris and this time Robert Morison of the Concours group. Where the [...]

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Book Review – Principles of the Business Rule Approach

August 1, 2009

Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ron Ross
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 technology for managing business rules so much [...]

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Book Review – Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach

August 1, 2009

Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach by Barbara von Halle
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 techniques [...]

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Book Review – Business Rules Management and Service-Oriented Architecture

August 1, 2009

Business Rules Management and Service-Oriented Architecture by Ian Graeme
This 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 and then introduces business rules, both as an approach and as a class of technology. He [...]

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Book Review – Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way

August 1, 2009

Business Rule Revolution: Running Business the Right Way by Barbara Von Halle, Larry Goldberg
The book is a collection of chapters, not necessarily designed to be read in sequence. The chapters include:

A great summary of various rules projects surveyed by KPI showing the focus on agility, consistency, knowledge management, legacy modernization, business control (though interestingly not [...]

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Book Review – The Best Service is No Service

July 1, 2008

The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs
I just finished reading The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs and I can’t recommend it too highly.
This is a tremendous book laying [...]

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Book Review – groundswell

June 12, 2008

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
I have just finished reading Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Groundswell is a great book providing a thorough and up to date discussion of how to use social media, and more, to connect with and energize your customers. The book approaches the discussion [...]

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Book Review – The IT Value Stack

March 21, 2008

The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT LeadershipI recently finished Ade McCormack’s book, The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. The book is aimed at a fairly high-level audience and makes a case for better integration, or “entwinement”, of technology into businesses. Ade can come across somewhat opinionated but he [...]

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Book Review: Super Crunchers

October 16, 2007

Super Crunchers: Why thinking by numbers is the new way to be smart
Ian Ayres book, Super Crunchers: Why thinking by numbers is the new way to be smart, is another book extolling the virtues of data-driven decision making. In that regard it is very similar to Competing on Analytics. The book focuses in on the [...]

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Book Review – The power to predict

August 26, 2007

The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and beat the competition
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). I liked the book – it was readable and well-written. It was [...]

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Book Review – IT Risk

August 15, 2007

IT Risk: Turning Business Threats into Competitive Advantage
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 one with potentially serious consequences. As businesses increasingly are there [...]

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Book Review – The Black Swan

August 8, 2007

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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 on and on and on…. Leaving aside the [...]

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Book Review – Hard facts, dangerous half truths and total nonsense

June 18, 2007

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management
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, and instead “miracle cure” advice [...]

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Book Review – Chocolates on the pillow aren’t enough

May 8, 2007

Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience
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 has two main sections – a problem/solution [...]

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Book Review – Competing on Analytics

February 26, 2007

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 what they call “analytic competitors”, that is to say companies that use their analytic prowess not just to enhance their operations but as their [...]

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Book Review – Data Mining Techniques

December 26, 2006

Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management
This is one of the classic works on data mining and well worth the read.I really liked the book both because it is well written and because, although it drilled into a fair amount of detail about some of the techniques, it started each new section [...]

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Book Review – Execution

December 20, 2006

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 dysfunctional behaviors seen in large corporations and lay out [...]

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Book Review – The world is flat

December 14, 2006

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
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 if somewhat long winded read. [...]

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Book Review – Making robust decisions

December 11, 2006

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. It’s a quick read with some great advice for anyone trying to make [...]

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Book Review – The only sustainable edge

November 30, 2006

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization
In this book John and John discuss how recent changes in the world will force, indeed are forcing, companies to change how they think about offshoring and outsourcing, innovation and even their core business processes. They describe how a combination of “Converging [...]

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