Enterprise architecture requires an understanding of all technologies, strategies, and data consumption throughout the enterprise. To this end, one must strive to always broaden knowledge of existing, as well as emerging trends and solutions. As a trade, this role demands an understanding beyond the specificities of technologies and vendor products. An enterprise architect must be versatile with the design and arrangement of elements in an extended network enterprise. Intended for anyone charged with coordinating enterprise architectural design in a small, medium, or large organization, Sustainable Enterprise Architecture helps you explore the various elements of your own particular network environment to develop strategies for mid- to long-term management and sustainable growth. Organized much like a book on structural architecture, this one starts with a solid foundation of frameworks and general guidelines for enterprise governance and design. The book covers common considerations for all enterprises, and then drills down to specific types of technology that may be found in your enterprise. It explores strategies for protecting enterprise resources and examines technologies and strategies that are only just beginning to take place in the modern enterprise network. Each chapter builds on the knowledge and understanding of topics presented earlier in the book to give you a thorough understanding of the challenges and opportunities in managing enterprise resources within a well-designed architectural strategy. Emphasizing only those strategies that weather change, Sustainable Enterprise Architecture shows you how to evaluate your own unique environment and find alignment with the concepts of sustainability and architecture. It gives you the tools to build solutions and policies to protect your enterprise and allow it to provide the greatest organizational value into the future.

Machine learning and data analytics are powering a wave of groundbreaking technologies. Is your company ready?

If you read nothing else on how intelligent machines are revolutionizing business, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you understand how these technologies work together, how to adopt them, and why your strategy can't ignore them.

In this book you'll learn how:

- Data science, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, is yielding unprecedented business insights

- Blockchain has the potential to restructure the economy

- Drones and driverless vehicles are becoming essential tools

- 3-D printing is making new business models possible

- Augmented reality is transforming retail and manufacturing

- Smart speakers are redefining the rules of marketing

- Humans and machines are working together to reach new levels of productivity

This book focuses on the nature and role of entrepreneurship in modern developed and emerging economies and societies, its relation to governments and universities, and its role in the often-forgotten informal economy. The aim is to position entrepreneurship in the post-crisis context and explore how its relation to universities and governments contributes to explain the countries' and territories' growth performance and resilience or vulnerability to the crisis. The accent is particularly on processes and patterns at local level and in small and medium-sized enterprises in local economic systems and districts, local systems of innovation, and the types and configurations of innovation these give origin to. With globalization, entrepreneurship has become fundamental for the competitiveness of territories and countries, for policy management and for development. The local dimension is fundamental because of agglomeration economies and effects, the advantages of proximity and the nature of knowledge and information. Furthermore, territories carry to the centre-stage tacit knowledge, localized social capital, embeddedness and interpersonal relations as fundamental components of their endogenous socio-economic development and competitiveness. When local systems are connected in a horizontal network, they contribute to the strength of national and international systems. To play a constructive role from this perspective, entrepreneurship must avoid local entrenchment and support the local economy to upgrade and be competitive. To do this, the entrepreneurs' interaction and alliance with universities and governments is a must for those countries and localities wanting to emerge. This requires that enterprises, universities and governments create synergies and spill-overs to their mutual advantage.

A disruption in your call center operation can conceivably cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And multiple disruptions can cost in the millions. Call Center Continuity Planning shows you how to plan for - and avoid - service interruptions through disasters large and small. This book will show you how to deal with everything from power outages to major hurricanes. Should you use external Call Volume Management (CVM) solutions such as pre-established procedures for disaster call routing? Or, should you use internal solutions such as planning for a company cold site, virtual call center, or use of the excess capacity of your other call center during emergency? What about managing call volumes to cope with non-emergency seasonal or time of day peaks? Can you use your call centers minimum daily overflow of calls as a benefit rather than a problem? What is involved in contracting to outsource call handling to another call center in terms of effectiveness, expertise, technology, and human resources - and what advanced call processing techniques are available? Call Center Continuity Planning answers all these questions and more. It also provides detailed information on the concept of CVM, that treats the volume of calls as a fluid, that can be channeled from one place to another via computer-managed switching. Your Call Volume Management system acts like a series of aqueducts to manage the floodwaters of incoming calls before your call-takers are swept away.

When Innovation is considered one of the key drivers of corporate success, why do organisations struggle to implement it? Research suggests that innovations fail due to a lack of acceptance by employees; therefore an understanding of potential adopters and the factors influencing their decisions is essential. Despite much research on adoption of innovation by an organization, very little is known about its acceptance by individuals within it. Managing Innovation Adoption is about managing technological innovation implementation at work in an effective way by presenting a new theoretical framework. Based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA), the technology acceptance model (TAM) and other conceptual frameworks, Dr Talukder's enhanced model combines factors from existing and original models to create a coherent new model. The data collected proves that it can be used to assist a broader understanding of how people in an organization adopt and use innovations. As well as contributing to academic knowledge, the author's discoveries have practical implications for organizations, managers, administrators and employees.

This book offers a general theoretical framework for approaching innovation and entrepreneurship, using practical and up-to-date examples to demonstrate three different levels of innovation and entrepreneurship: the macro-level, which concerns the impact of innovation activity on economic growth and production systems; the meso-level, which concerns the relations between firms, research institutes and governmental bodies and their role in innovation activity; and the micro-level, which concerns the dynamics of innovations within firms and organisations. Providing a critical overview of existing research and demonstrating the importance of a transdisciplinary framework for studies of innovation and entrepreneurship, the author advances a general concept of 'collective entrepreneurship' that emphasises the social and collaborative nature of innovation and entrepreneurship, thus shedding light on processes of innovation and entrepreneurship as active practices of social construction. As such, it will appeal to scholars of economic sociology, political science, economic geography and economists, as well as those with interests in innovation policy.

Women and Sustainability in Business: A Global Perspective, brings together original research from a dozen countries, concerning the issues and challenges facing women in sustainable business. This is a recurrent topic among researchers, regulators, companies and rating agencies. Governments pay special attention to how women impact the economy when shaping their strategies on economic sustainability. Women's contribution to business is fundamental to creating a sustainable economy, such that businesses try to strengthen 'women's presence' within their organisations, especially on their boards. Today, sustainable companies cannot survive without strategies involving women. Stakeholders, regulators, NGOs and rating agencies track both women-focused strategies and the corporate sustainability reports of companies. Well-designed strategies for women workers help companies to develop their financial and social sustainability initiatives progressively. This book analyses the practice of women in sustainable business, in terms of company performance, social responsibility, board management, entrepreneurship, employment, education, management, social sustainability, environmental politics and technology, from a wide range of diverse, regional perspectives and highlights the differences between the underdeveloped, developing and developed world.

This book analyses the determining factors behind productivity and innovation amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore, and within the context of South East Asia, in order to offer recommendations for increasing productivity and aiding economic growth. SME firms are an influential driver of economic growth in advanced world economies like the USA, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Throughout the 2000s, Singapore experienced a decline in economic growth which was linked to decreasing productivity in its SMEs. The decline triggered a transformational policy by a Government intent on forging a 'high skill-high productivity' future. Given substantial evidence that low productivity growth occurred in sectors where immigrants dominated the workforce, the seeds of recovery focused on improving productivity and innovation amongst SMEs in those sectors. Hence, this book investigates the factors determining productivity amongst SMEs across the manufacturing sector. It utilises personal interviews with global experts and CEOs, combined with primary data collected from a major international Delphi survey, and interviews with 215 SME owners and managers in Singapore. This data helps us to better understand how these productivity-enhancing factors can be used to increase performance amongst SMEs. By investigating the nature and process of total factor productivity in Singapore's SMEs, this book tells the policy story behind the revolution. To provide a comparative analysis, Singapore's story is placed within a South East Asian context. The unfolding narrative contains important lessons for policy makers and industry globally, as they assess the strategic choices available to them for improving productivity and innovation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of innovation and productivity, as well as economic development officers, government policy advisors, SME business managers and sustainable businesses.

Where is Creativity? A Multi-disciplinary Approach goes beyond the orthodox image of creativity as laying inside the brain-mind, to explore how and why it also emerges from relationships between people, from physical spaces such as workplaces and cities, as a result of new media technology and the Web, and due to the effects of broad contexts of the economy and industry. It explores contemporary psychological, sociological, anthropological, economic and philosophical debates concerning creativity in an accessible way, which non-specialist and creative practitioners can appreciate, culminating in a picture of the anatomy of creativity which seeks to provide a concrete guide to the 'doing' of creativity to complement a deeper understanding of its nature and origins. The book will be useful for teaching staff and students; businesses and practitioners; and professionals and policy-makers working within a wide range of creative and innovation-based industries.

Family businesses constitute some of the most unique, complex, and dynamic systems in modern society. The blending of the performance-based world of business and the emotion-based domain of the family creates a system potentially fraught with confusion and conflict. The significant rise in immigrant family businesses adds a further level of complexity to this mix. Research into immigrant family businesses has been based on traditional, limited views of entrepreneurship largely ignoring the ethnic and family contexts that create the culture from which entrepreneurship emerges, making it impossible to understand the complex and interdependent relationships between an owning family, its firm, its governance and the community context in which the firm operates. These firms possess features that make their governance a challenging task. They depict a complex stakeholder structure, whereby the ownership stakes are passed from one generation to the next. The owning family's members usually play multiple roles, thereby blurring governance relationships. Governance in Immigrant Family Businesses explores the relationship between ethnic cultural influence in family businesses and its impact on corporate governance, addressing the intertwined influences of contractual, relational and cultural governance mechanisms and sets out a comprehensive theoretical model which clarifies the complexities involved in business planning, family harmony, and ethnic cultural variables. The authors specifically identify the implications for research, education, and practice. Application of their model will be of value to policy makers, consultants, business researchers and educators.

First published in 1999. The key to successful regional development is more a personality issue than a global one, contends social economist Dr. James Cecora. With a fresh new interdisciplinary approach, Cecora tackles traditional economic theory to show that a distinct type of individual, the 'innovative entrepreneur', can do more to secure economic stability in a particular region than any multinational corporation. Arguing that global economics have spiraled out of control, Cecora builds a case for supporting and promoting the development of entrepreneurs at the local and regional level. These individuals will, he says, work at strengthening the regional economy over the long term because of their permanent attachment to a region, as well as in vested self-interest. Cecora compares the personalities of corporate managers to self-starting entrepreneurs, drawing the conclusion that the risk-taking ability of entrepreneurial types prompts more creative thinking and regionally appropriate action and solutions. This willingness to try new approaches is often a key to success.

Improving Mathematics at Work questions the mathematical knowledge and skills that matter in the twenty-first century world of work, and studies how the use of mathematics in the workplace is evolving in the rapidly-changing context of new technologies and globalisation. Through a series of case studies from the manufacturing and financial service sectors, the authors argue that there has been a radical shift in the type mathematical skills required for work ? a shift not yet fully recognised by the formal education system, or by employers and managers.

Examining how information technology has changed mathematical requirements, the idea of Techno-mathematical Literacies (TmL) is introduced to describe the emerging need to be fluent in the language of mathematical inputs and outputs to technologies and to interpret and communicate with these, rather than merely to be procedurally competent with calculations. The authors argue for careful analyses of workplace activities, looking beyond the conventional thinking about numeracy, which still dominates policy arguments about workplace mathematics. Throughout their study, the authors answer the following fundamental questions:

• What mathematical knowledge and skills matter for the world of work today?
• How does information technology change the necessary knowledge and the ways in which it is encountered?
• How can we develop these essential new skills in the workforce?

With evidence of successful opportunities to learn with TmL that were co-designed and evaluated with employers and employees, this book provides suggestions for the development of TmL through the use of authentic learning activities, and interactive software design. Essential reading for trainers and managers in industry, teachers, researchers and lecturers of mathematics education, and stakeholders implementing evidence-based policy, this book maps the fundamental changes taking place in workplace mathematics.

First published in 1997, This book now opens the unduly delayed discussion about how Israel and the USA deal with immigration and how they are transformed by it. Approaching the discussion from the point of view of contemporary immigration research, this book prioritizes the economic processes of immigrant insertion in Israel and the USA, immigrant absorption and assimilation in both countries, policy debates, and women immigrants for extended treatment. Additionally, a photographic section mobilizes the new subject of visual sociology to continue the comparative analysis.

First published in 1998, this volume takes an international approach to women's evolving perspectives on self-employment, with a particular focus on women in India. Author Uschi Kraus-Harper draws on ten years of research and interviews, visits and observations, gathering women's stories from around the world. This book deeply explores women's situations, empowerment, changing perceptions of enterprise, the effects of poverty and gender and what success really means. It is about poor women and their relation to self-employment. It is also about why change has come to some women and not to others.

For those wishing to acquire knowledge on national development issues, this comprehensive compendium traverses a spectrum of subjects that the audience ought to be well acquainted with. The Editors provide instructive findings regarding national development, economic growth and their determinants, but they also offer historical perspectives on the subject and the implications for developing countries. The book addresses a suite of critical themes regarded by development experts to be germane in considering the pertinence of policies and their effective execution. These seven general thematic areas are explored: c Leadership, governance, policy and strategy c Public sector and public financial management c Culture, institutions and people c Natural resources c Science, technology and infrastructure c Private sector and financial markets c Marketing, branding and service delivery This thematic approach enables the contributors to explore the impact of the constituents of each subject area on national development, within the context of a developing economy. The significance of the findings for the relevant stakeholders is consequently reviewed. The combination of theory and practice makes the book and its contents unique.

Designed for a one-semester course, Applied Statistics for Business and Economics offers students in business and the social sciences an effective introduction to some of the most basic and powerful techniques available for understanding their world. Numerous interesting and important examples reflect real-life situations, stimulating students to think realistically in tackling these problems. Calculations can be performed using any standard spreadsheet package. To help with the examples, the author offers both actual and hypothetical databases on his website http: //iwu.edu/ bleekley

The text explores ways to describe data and the relationships found in data. It covers basic probability tools, Bayes? theorem, sampling, estimation, and confidence intervals. The text also discusses hypothesis testing for one and two samples, contingency tables, goodness-of-fit, analysis of variance, and population variances. In addition, the author develops the concepts behind the linear relationship between two numeric variables (simple regression) as well as the potentially nonlinear relationships among more than two variables (multiple regression). The final chapter introduces classical time-series analysis and how it applies to business and economics.

This text provides a practical understanding of the value of statistics in the real world. After reading the book, students will be able to summarize data in insightful ways using charts, graphs, and summary statistics as well as make inferences from samples, especially about relationships.

This book examines entrepreneurship from three interrelated perspectives. Firstly, it links entrepreneurship to innovation and to the generation, transformation and use of knowledge. Secondly, it inserts entrepreneurship in innovation systems of various types- national, sectoral and local. Thirdly, it views entrepreneurship not as a single event but as a process that evolves in time, from the pre-entry experience, to the entrepreneurial act, to the evolution of the entrepreneur and the new company.

With chapters from a range of international contributors, the book answers questions such as; what are the main dimensions of knowledge intensive entrepreneurship? What are the factors affecting its emergence, evolution and performance? How important is knowledge intensive entrepreneurship for European growth and competitiveness? Is the situation of Central and Eastern Europe, engaged in a process of major economic and institutional transformation, similar or different from the one of Western Europe?

Equips students and recent graduates with the tools and confidence to develop their own digital presence, addressing the growth in employability and professional skills courses globally; Unlike competing texts, requires no pre-existing technical knowledge, approaching the subject from a strategic and employability perspective rather than a technical or purely marketing approach; Introduces the new ABCDE framework and a series of practical tools and international case studies

The world beyond 2020 will be profoundly different from today. Radical transformative technologies are changing the relationship between mankind and machines in a way that even Wells, Orwell, or Jobs could not fathom. Nobody can tell for certain what will emerge from these tectonic shifts, save for the fact that the status quo is already obsolete. In effect, humanity has entered a new age in its evolution: the Symbiocene era. Societal issues notwithstanding, the existential concern for businesses and organizations everywhere is pressing: how to survive, or better yet, thrive in this brave new scary world? The Binary Firm explores the orchestrating strategies to get in front of the technological tsunami that is sweeping the globe. Tsunami is not too strong a word: witness the threat posed by artificial intelligence to the very nature of work. This book constructs a conceptual management framework engineered to anticipate changes and empower the organization to exploit them to its immediate advantage. The exposition goes beyond worn-out buzzwords like innovation, disruption, and collaboration. It dives into the underlying foundation of an organization impacting its financial destiny. This book will resonate with managers and entrepreneurs who may struggle to master the often-mystifying rigors of digital forces. As goes the new adage, every business is a software company. But how to tame this feral beast? Readers will find pragmatic answers herein. No organization can afford the status quo in this era of pervasive interconnections. This is the playbook to change your game and succeed at digitally transforming your organization without breaking the bank.

The world beyond 2020 will be profoundly different from today. Radical transformative technologies are changing the relationship between mankind and machines in a way that even Wells, Orwell, or Jobs could not fathom. Nobody can tell for certain what will emerge from these tectonic shifts, save for the fact that the status quo is already obsolete. In effect, humanity has entered a new age in its evolution: the Symbiocene era. Societal issues notwithstanding, the existential concern for businesses and organizations everywhere is pressing: how to survive, or better yet, thrive in this brave new scary world? The Binary Firm explores the orchestrating strategies to get in front of the technological tsunami that is sweeping the globe. Tsunami is not too strong a word: witness the threat posed by artificial intelligence to the very nature of work. This book constructs a conceptual management framework engineered to anticipate changes and empower the organization to exploit them to its immediate advantage. The exposition goes beyond worn-out buzzwords like innovation, disruption, and collaboration. It dives into the underlying foundation of an organization impacting its financial destiny. This book will resonate with managers and entrepreneurs who may struggle to master the often-mystifying rigors of digital forces. As goes the new adage, every business is a software company. But how to tame this feral beast? Readers will find pragmatic answers herein. No organization can afford the status quo in this era of pervasive interconnections. This is the playbook to change your game and succeed at digitally transforming your organization without breaking the bank.

This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of microfinance initiatives in India. Through substantive field research and case studies ranging across the country, it examines Indian microfinance within its distinct socio-economic realities the role of women, financial inclusion, rural entrepreneurship, and innovation its interactions with mult

The Beatles are considered the most influential popular music act of the twentieth century, widely recognized for their influence on popular culture. The inability of other bands and artists to imitate their fame has prompted questions such as: How did the Beatles become so successful? What factors contributed to their success? Why did they break up? The Beatles and Economics: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and the Making of a Cultural Revolution answers these questions using the lens of economic analysis. Economics provides the prism for explaining why their success-while legendary in scale-is not mythic. This book explores how the band's commercial achievements were intimately tied to the larger context of economic globalization and rebuilding post-World War II. It examines how the Beatles' time in Hamburg is best understood as an investment in human capital, and why the entrepreneurial growth mindset was critical to establishing a scalable market niche and sustaining the Beatles' ability to lead and shape emerging markets in entertainment and popular music. Later chapters consider how the economics of decision making and organizational theory helps us to understand the band's break-up at its economic peak. This essential text is of interest to anyone interested in the economic dynamics and social forces that shape cultural change.

The theory of costs is a cornerstone of economic thinking, and figures crucially in the study of human action and society. From the first day of a principles-level course to the most advanced academic literature, costs play a vital role in virtually all behaviors and economic outcomes. How we make choices, why we trade, and how we build institutions and social orders are all problems that can be explained in light of the costs we face. This volume explores, develops, and critiques the rich literature on costs, examining some of the many ways cost remains relevant in economic theory and practice. The book especially studies costs from the perspective of the Austrian or "causal-realist" approach to economics. The chapters integrate the history of economic thought with contemporary research, finding valuable crossroads between numerous traditions in economics. They examine the role of costs in theories of choice and opportunity costs; demand and income effects; production and distribution; risk and interest rates; uncertainty and production; monopsony; Post-Keynesianism; transaction costs; socialism and management; and social entrepreneurship. Together, these papers represent an update and restatement of a central element in the economic way of thinking. Each chapter reveals how the Austrian, causalrealist approach to costs can be used to solve an important problem or debate in economics. These chapters are not only useful for students learning these concepts for the first time: they are also valuable for researchers seeking to understand the unique Austrian perspective and those who want to apply it to new problems.

Quality care of patients requires evaluating large amounts of data at the right time and place and in the correct context. With the advent of electronic health records, data warehouses now provide information at the point of care and facilitate a continuous learning environment in which lessons learned can provide updates to clinical, administrative, and financial processes. Given the advancement of the information tools and techniques of today's knowledge economy, utilizing these resources are imperative for effective healthcare. Thus, the principles of Knowledge Management (KM) are now essential for quality healthcare management.

The Healthcare Knowledge Management Primer explores and explains essential KM principles in healthcare settings in an introductory and easy to understand fashion. This concise book is ideal for both students and professionals who need to learn more about key aspects of the KM field as it pertains to effecting superior healthcare delivery. It provides readers with an understanding of approaches to KM by examining the purpose and nature of its key components and demystifies the KM field by explaining in an accessible manner the key concepts of KM tools, strategies and techniques, and their benefits to contemporary healthcare organizations.

Spectacular security failures continue to dominate the headlines despite huge increases in security budgets and ever-more draconian regulations. The 20/20 hindsight of audits is no longer an effective solution to security weaknesses, and the necessity for real-time strategic metrics has never been more critical. Information Security Management Metrics: A Definitive Guide to Effective Security Monitoring and Measurement offers a radical new approach for developing and implementing security metrics essential for supporting business activities and managing information risk. This work provides anyone with security and risk management responsibilities insight into these critical security questions:How secure is my organization? How much security is enough? What are the most cost-effective security solutions? How secure is my organization? You can't manage what you can't measure This volume shows readers how to develop metrics that can be used across an organization to assure its information systems are functioning, secure, and supportive of the organization's business objectives. It provides a comprehensive overview of security metrics, discusses the current state of metrics in use today, and looks at promising new developments. Later chapters explore ways to develop effective strategic and management metrics for information security governance, risk management, program implementation and management, and incident management and response. The book ensures that every facet of security required by an organization is linked to business objectives, and provides metrics to measure it. Case studies effectively demonstrate specific ways that metrics can be implemented across an enterprise to maximize business benefit. With three decades of enterprise information security experience, author Krag Brotby presents a workable approach to developing and managing cost-effective enterprise information security.