The role of service level manager is a critical one in that the agreements negotiated with customers should inform the activities of the service provider. This book aims to help those whose role is to establish, negotiate, manage or update service level agreements and to use these as the basis of continual service improvement. It covers areas such as purpose, required skills, responsibilities, interface and career progression as well as tools, standards and frameworks related to the role.

From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

In Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs' professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs' family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

This book is a case study in industrial economics, using the computing industry as a base at a time when it was undergoing drastic changes. The objective was to identify and analyze those major forces and mechanisms which account for the evolution of an industry. The approach is to recognize the diversity of enterprises and to explore the interplay between products, production processes and the characteristics of enterprises, including their organization and management systems, which business experience indeed shows can be decisive competitive advantages or disadvantages. One might expect the analysis of competitive processes to be readily available in the economic literature, but most economists treat firms as black boxes, ignoring their differences. Beyond providing the basic concepts and mechanisms, mainstream economics are of little help here, since their fundamental paradigms of competition and equilibrium all but ignore the real-world notions of enterprise, differentiation and competition. To understand the internal working of enterprises, one has to turn to the so-called "management" literature, which unfortunately most often stops at the border of the enterprise and seldom tackles the interplay between internal choices and the workings of the market. The separation of those two disciplines is an essential weakness when considering the subject of this book. Economic theory uses too schematic a view of the firm, and organizational theory has too little concern for the market environment. This book attempts to combine those two strands of thought into one theory of industrial structure. Its subject, one particular industry, is limited enough for theory to be always confronted with the experience of the business professional. At the same time, that subject is comprehensive enough to allow moving beyond a pure monograph and to support the beginnings of new conceptual developments. The same approach and concepts could prove useful in the analysis of other complex industries, and perhaps form a starting point for more general contributions to research into industry structures. This book was originally written in French and published in 1996, based on research done in 1994/1995 and on the statistics available at that time. The author translated it into English, but the French publisher could not find an English-language counterpart. The French version is now out of print and the publisher has renounced the rights. New publishing techniques, including print on demand, now allow an independent publisher to make a book available in printed form with a minimal investment. The world has changed since the book was written, most notably computers and the computing industry. There have been giant advances in microelectronics and in their applications to all walks of life. Many firms and products have disappeared, and many new have emerged. Many catch-phrases are now obsolete; new ones are now popular. Also, the easily accessible industry statistics that I used have been discontinued. Updating the book to 2013 would involve a complete rewrite and extensive additional research. But I happen to believe that the approach and concepts put forward in 1996 are still worth publishing in their original state. Concerning the analytical approach and the conclusions, I leave it to the reader to evaluate which are obsolete and which are still valid today. Concerning the predictions that I ventured at the time on the basis of that analysis, it turns out that they did materialize to a large extent. At any rate, the factual part, i. e. the history and the industry statistics in the period 1950-1995, may still be of interest as far as it goes. Be that as it may, I urge the reader to constantly keep in mind that the book was written in 1995, using data available at that time, relying on the technologies of the time and on whatever literature I was able to lay my hands on. In the context of this book, "today" must always be understood as "in 1995."

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online-and the large societal impact of these decisions Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn. Whether faced with "fake news" or livestreamed violence, "content moderators"-who censor or promote user-posted content-have never been more important. This is especially true when the tools that social media platforms use to curb trolling, ban hate speech, and censor pornography can also silence the speech you need to hear. In this revealing and nuanced exploration, award-winning sociologist and cultural observer Tarleton Gillespie provides an overview of current social media practices and explains the underlying rationales for how, when, and why these policies are enforced. In doing so, Gillespie highlights that content moderation receives too little public scrutiny even as it is shapes social norms and creates consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Based on interviews with content moderators, creators, and consumers, this accessible, timely book is a must-read for anyone who's ever clicked "like" or "retweet."

This book is among the first to use a media events framework to examine Chinas Internet activism and politics, and the first study of the transformation of Chinas media events through the parameter of online activism. The author locates the practices of major modes of online activism in China (shanzhai [culture jamming]; citizen journalism; and weiguan [mediated mobilization]) into different types of Chinese media events (ritual celebration, natural disaster, political scandal). The contextualized analysis of online activism thus enables exploration of the spatial, temporal and relational dimensions of Chinese online activism with other social agents such as the Party-state, mainstream media and civil society. Analysis reveals Internet politics in China on three interrelated levels: the individual, the discursive and the institutional. Contemporary cases, rich in empirical research data and interdisciplinary theory, demonstrate that the alternative and activist use of the Internet has intervened into and transformed conventional Chinese media events in various types of agents, their agendas and performances, and the subsequent and corresponding political impact. The Party-market controlled Chinese media events have become more open, contentious and deliberative in the Web 2.0 era due to the active participation of ordinary Chinese people aided by the Internet.