Intelligent IT Outsourcing enables practitioners to focus in on the essential issues that need to be addressed so that the fundamental structure of their sourcing strategy and its implementation is sound. The authors provide insight into the challenges likely to be faced and give detailed advice on how to pre-empt and manage these.

IT and outsourcing continue to be problematic, not least because fundamental learning about this subject fails to be applied systematically, and because IT is inherently difficult to manage. The economics are not obvious and emerging technologies have to be addressed, therefore IT goes to the heart of many enterprises and interfaces with multiple business units and processes, and there are continuous skills shortages.
Unfortunately complexities are not removed in outsourced situations where additional problems come into play, for example the supplier's capabilities, whether the IT is right for an outsourcing solution, and whether the contract is robust but flexible enough to allow for outsourcing to take place. Objectives need to be realistic, and factors such as whether the internal management is mature and capable enough in this field, and the impact of prohibitive switching costs on behaviour once an outsourcing deal has been signed all have to be taken into account.
The authors have built up over two decades of research, advisory and practitioner experience that enables them to distil the fundamental challenges in IT and outsourcing and demonstrate how these can be addressed.
* Focuses on the fundamentals of what should be done and what should be avoided, based on actual experience applied in major IT outsourcing deals
* Researchfindings and case examples included throughout to support recommended practices
* Written by highly experienced, internationally acknowledged experts in the field

'Delivering Business Value from IT' is focused on the evaluation issue in IT and how IT evaluation can proceed across the life-cycle of any IT investment and be linked positively to improving business performance.
Chapters 1,2 and 3 detail an approach to IT evaluation whilst chapters 4 and 5 build on these by showing two distinctive approaches to linking IT to business performance. The remaining three chapters deal with a range of evaluation issues emerging as important - specifically Internet evaluation, Y2K and beyond, EMU, quality outsourcing, infrastructure, role of benchmarking, and cost of ownership issues that practitioners regularly encounter.
A 'Computer Weekly' Professional Series book
Contains high visibility case studies including Safeway, Unipart, Hewlett Packard, Morgan Stanley, CNN, BP Exploration, British Aerospace, and Royal and Sun Alliance.

This pioneering guide offers the first comprehensive analysis to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) risks as actually experienced and dealt with by organizations. The authors present analysis and findings from a two-year study. As more organizations adopt RPA, they find that best practice companies are able to gain a 'triple win' from RPA: a win for shareholders, a win for customers, and a win for employees. But while such results are impressive, they are far from guaranteed. Service automation, like all organizational initiatives, is fraught with risks that need to be mitigated. The RPA risk mitigation framework reveals the significantRPA risks, and identifies 30 key risk mitigation practices that the research found to be successful. Whether an organization is just beginning its RPA journey or has reached maturity, this definitive guide serves as a key source of knowledge.

74 of the most popular items from Carols for Choirs 1, 2 and 3 in one volume, plus 26 pieces new to the series. The volume contains both accompanied and unaccompanied items, and the Order of Service for a Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Orchestral and brass ensemble accompaniments for many of the items are available on hire.

Robotic Process Automation will continue its exponential growth over the next five years. With more than 54 vendors, different kinds of tools, generic applicability and as a cognitive and AI platform, RPA has fast become an opportunity that is too good to miss. So, how do you leverage the massive potential business value? Based on four years of research into over 420 business deployments, this book identifies the distinctive leading practices of front-runners, and a Total Value of Ownership (TVO) framework to drive out value across the RPA life-cycle. This book brings a new focus on RPA's strategic potential: the innovations made possible and how to deliver through effective sourcing stakeholder-buy-in, governance, change management, and capability development practices. RPA as a platform, linking with cognitive and AI technologies as part of digital transformation is highlighted. The central messages - think and behave strategically, start right, institutionalize fast, and innovate continuously - are demonstrated, with multiple client experiences, trials and lessons. From dealing with old world process and IT challenges, RPA is now being applied towards building the new digital world and becoming strategic in its application. * Based on extensive new research by world renowned authors * Comprehensive market overview * A systematic set of action principles across the RPA life-cycle * Challenges, and where value is being left on the table * A focus on metrics and Total Value of Ownership * Multiple client case studies * RPA as a foundation for cognitive and AI

First published in 1983, Moving from the Primary Classroom is concerned with what happens to pupils when they change teachers in the primary school and when they move to the secondary or middle school. Although most children are well prepared for the organizational changes, they will face after transfer, the researchers found that major difficulties were encountered when pupils adjusted to the new teaching styles associated with specialist subjects. As pupils move up the primary school, and after transfer, there appears to be a decrease in individualization of the learning process in favour of whole-class teaching and group work. This poses particular problems for pupils who find the work either too difficult or not sufficiently challenging. The disparity in the varying rates at which children complete their work sometimes causes acute problems which are fully documented. This book will be of interest to students of education, pedagogy as well as teachers.

In this wide-ranging collection, Professor Willcocks and Professor Lacity examine the economic determinants and outcomes of outsourcing and offshoring at both the firm and country levels. They provide a comprehensive overview of the topic, offering an interdisciplinary perspective, which covers the empirical and theoretical research not only of economists but also of researchers from other disciplines, most notably business strategy, information systems and international business. With an authoritative, original introduction by the editors, the book will be an indispensible guide to students and scholars, wishing to understand the theoretical and empirical research on the economics of outsourcing from its beginnings in the 1930s to current thinking.

Information systems research (IS) is an exciting multidisciplinary area that links the rapidly changing technology of information (or communications and information technology, ICT) to the business and social environment. Lately, the discourse surrounding information and systems has leaped into the consciousness of the public in unprecedented ways through the rise of social media, the Internet of Things (IoT), 'fake news' and the weaponization of information, to name a few. Unfortunately, it has been felt that these developments are overtaking the ability of the IS field to address them, in part, because the field itself lacks its own native theories. It is well known that the IS field undertakes its research using theories from its 'reference disciplines' such as management, social psychology, economics, communication and computer science, but what this book offers is a clarification and implementation of the discipline's own foundational theory. This book is the companion volume to Advancing Information Systems Theories: Volume I, and part of a three part series that aims to advance IS research. This volume addresses the products of information systems theories, examining design principles, information, practice principles for robotics, and other concepts integral to developing theory. The book will be of interest to academics studying information systems, Big Data, digital business, information technology, innovation management, and digital management.

The central concepts of information meaning, embodied cognition and semiotics are hugely relevant to contemporary organisations and personal and social lives. However, these concepts are not well understood and are frequently under-represented, misrepresented, and their importance seriously underplayed in the study of management. This is particularly noticeable in the study of the information systems and digital technologies that underpin so much of business operations, personal and social life, organisation, communication and management today. This book seeks to fill the obvious gap. It provides detailed understanding of fundamental concepts and develops a useable, integrative semiotics framework. The framework is grounded in rich social theory and philosophy, and, as the book demonstrates, provides a valuable exploratory and explanatory framework for researchers. This takes shape as a 12-step research process, that has the general features of most research methodologies but also provides distinctive rich resources for in-depth research into semiotically related phenomena. It will be of great interest to academics undertaking research in digital technologies and business model innovation, as well as scholars of research methodology, organisation studies, HRM, marketing and information systems.

'Making IT Count: from strategy to implementation' focuses on the practical elements of delivering Information Technology strategy. Studies regularly show that over half of Information Technology strategies are never implemented, or are unsuccessful in delivering the desired results, and that a significant percentage of strategies implemented were never in the original plans. The linkage between strategy development and delivery needs a very clear focus; this is the key topic that the authors address. The book highlights eight major fallacies in managing IT, and eighteen better practices. It then details how to draw up strategy, instigate navigation techniques and make sourcing decisions. Change and delivery are a major focus, as is infrastructure development. Caselets and full length case studies of organizations such as General Electric, Siemens, Colonial Mutual, Charles Schwab, Macquarie Bank, ICI, United Airlines, Norwich Union, Walgreens and Dell and have been included to show how strategies have been successfully implemented and managed.

Promoting pupils' creativity when they use ICT, this book also encourages learning across core as well as foundation subjects. It includes: flexible activities for pupils to refer to as they work through the activities; helpful examples of work so pupils know what to aim for; additional support sheets that can be used by the pupil of the teacher; departure points for integrated studies; extension activities that will encourage further creativity.

'Making IT Count: from strategy to implementation' focuses on the practical elements of delivering Information Technology strategy. Studies regularly show that over half of Information Technology strategies are never implemented, or are unsuccessful in delivering the desired results, and that a significant percentage of strategies implemented were never in the original plans. The linkage between strategy development and delivery needs a very clear focus; this is the key topic that the authors address. The book highlights eight major fallacies in managing IT, and eighteen better practices. It then details how to draw up strategy, instigate navigation techniques and make sourcing decisions. Change and delivery are a major focus, as is infrastructure development. Caselets and full length case studies of organizations such as General Electric, Siemens, Colonial Mutual, Charles Schwab, Macquarie Bank, ICI, United Airlines, Norwich Union, Walgreens and Dell and have been included to show how strategies have been successfully implemented and managed.

Where collaboration is needed and silo working creates barriers to achieving this, the cost to organisations can be very high: a lack of shared learning and innovation; unproductive conflict and stress; and significant financial costs due to programme failures. Collaborating for Results focuses on the human reasons for unproductive silo working in organisations, combining psychology with broader organisation development theory and practice. The central theme is that a visible agenda for building and maintaining working relationships across organisations is required by those seeking competitive advantage. It describes the contours of working relationships at three levels - individual, team and organisation - and proposes practical actions en route to collaboration and high performance. In doing so it acknowledges the complexity of people and relationships, the interrelationship of the three levels and explains the value of developing Open Teams at the heart of an integrated approach to business and organisational development. Organisation silos can feel like different countries, or even parallel worlds. Even in a single organisation, people in separate divisions or teams can talk a different language and have different work cultures that they each find difficult to understand and relate to. David Willcock's Collaborating for Results reframes organisation culture to bridge the divide, develop working relationships that save time and money and improve organisation performance.

Public Order and Private Lives is a radical examination of the political forces which shape the law and order debate in Britain. Mike Brake and Chris Hale provide a hard-hitting analysis of Conservative policies on Crime, showing that, ironically, Conservative policies have created the very social conditions in which crime has flourished. They argue that the government is undermining basic civil liberties by its increased use of legislation as a means of control and coercion.

'Delivering Business Value from IT' is focused on the evaluation issue in IT and how IT evaluation can proceed across the life-cycle of any IT investment and be linked positively to improving business performance. Chapters 1,2 and 3 detail an approach to IT evaluation whilst chapters 4 and 5 build on these by showing two distinctive approaches to linking IT to business performance. The remaining three chapters deal with a range of evaluation issues emerging as important - specifically Internet evaluation, Y2K and beyond, EMU, quality outsourcing, infrastructure, role of benchmarking, and cost of ownership issues that practitioners regularly encounter.

Intelligent IT Outsourcing enables practitioners to focus in on the essential issues that need to be addressed so that the fundamental structure of their sourcing strategy and its implementation is sound. The authors provide insight into the challenges likely to be faced and give detailed advice on how to pre-empt and manage these. IT and outsourcing continue to be problematic, not least because fundamental learning about this subject fails to be applied systematically, and because IT is inherently difficult to manage. The economics are not obvious and emerging technologies have to be addressed, therefore IT goes to the heart of many enterprises and interfaces with multiple business units and processes, and there are continuous skills shortages. Unfortunately complexities are not removed in outsourced situations where additional problems come into play, for example the supplier's capabilities, whether the IT is right for an outsourcing solution, and whether the contract is robust but flexible enough to allow for outsourcing to take place. Objectives need to be realistic, and factors such as whether the internal management is mature and capable enough in this field, and the impact of prohibitive switching costs on behaviour once an outsourcing deal has been signed all have to be taken into account. The authors have built up over two decades of research, advisory and practitioner experience that enables them to distil the fundamental challenges in IT and outsourcing and demonstrate how these can be addressed.

Public Order and Private Lives is a radical examination of the political forces which shape the law and order debate in Britain. Mike Brake and Chris Hale provide a hard-hitting analysis of Conservative policies on Crime, showing that, ironically, Conservative policies have created the very social conditions in which crime has flourished. They argue that the government is undermining basic civil liberties by its increased use of legislation as a means of control and coercion.

Where collaboration is needed and silo working creates barriers to achieving this, the cost to organisations can be very high: a lack of shared learning and innovation; unproductive conflict and stress; and significant financial costs due to programme failures. Collaborating for Results focuses on the human reasons for unproductive silo working in organisations, combining psychology with broader organisation development theory and practice. The central theme is that a visible agenda for building and maintaining working relationships across organisations is required by those seeking competitive advantage. It describes the contours of working relationships at three levels - individual, team and organisation - and proposes practical actions en route to collaboration and high performance. In doing so it acknowledges the complexity of people and relationships, the interrelationship of the three levels and explains the value of developing Open Teams at the heart of an integrated approach to business and organisational development. Organisation silos can feel like different countries, or even parallel worlds. Even in a single organisation, people in separate divisions or teams can talk a different language and have different work cultures that they each find difficult to understand and relate to. David Willcock's Collaborating for Results reframes organisation culture to bridge the divide, develop working relationships that save time and money and improve organisation performance.

By increasing the young person's self-knowledge and recognition of feelings, as well as offering practical suggestions and information, this programme enables young carers to review their own situations, to feel more in control and to come to their own decisions regarding any change that might benefit them.

A study of how artists and photographers shaped imperial visions of war and peace in the Victorian period In an era that saw the birth of photography (c. 1839) and the rise of the illustrated press (c. 1842), the British experience of their empire became increasingly defined by the processes and products of image-making. Examining moments of military and diplomatic crisis, this book considers how artists and photographers operating "in the field" helped to define British visions of war and peace. The Victorians increasingly turned to visual spectacle to help them compose imperial sovereignty. The British Empire was thus rendered into a spectacle of "peace," from world's fairs to staged diplomatic rituals. Yet this occurred against a backdrop of incessant colonial war-campaigns which, far from being ignored, were in fact unprecedentedly visible within the cultural forms of Victorian society. Visual media thus shaped the contours of imperial statecraft and established many of the aesthetic and ethical frames within which the colonial violence was confronted. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

"Of course I had to end up here . . ." Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-bargeman who used to be skipper of his own boat, walks the muddy fields of the landlocked German interior and remembers the events that lost him his home, his boat, and his livelihood: his apprenticeship in the cold halls of the Royal Naval College in London; the dangers of the mean streets and waterfront of New York in the 1970s, and Poland under martial law; Germany after the reunification, when for a year or so it seemed that the whole country drifted rudderless, drawn by the current of history to who knows where. In this novel from Gert Loschutz,Thomas remembers childhood, his first love, and the warnings of his grandfather: Beware the dark company! This mysterious band of men and women dressed in black cast a shadow over his story, as he wrestles with the secrets, the unplumbed depths of his soul, the hazards lurking below a seemingly placid surface, and throughout it all, the rain, falling night after night. Dark Company is a superb example of a distinctly German tradition in weird fiction which claims its roots in Kafka and Herbert Rosendorfer.

The information systems (IS) field represents a multidisciplinary area that links the rapidly changing technology of information (or communications and information technology, ICT) to the business and social environment. Despite the potential that the IS field has to develop its own native theories to address current issues involving ICT it has consistently borrowed theories from its "reference disciplines," often uncritically, to legitimize its research. This volume is the first of a series intended to advance IS research beyond this form of borrowed legitimization and derivative research towards fresh and original research that naturally comes from its own theories. It is inconceivable for a field so relevant to the era of the hyper-connected society, disruptive technologies, big data, social media, "fake news" and the weaponization of information to not be brimming with its own theories. The first step in reaching the goal of developing native IS theories is to reach an agreement on the need for theory (its rationale) and its role as the most distinctive product of human intellectual activity. This volume addresses what theories are, why bother with theories and the process of theorizing itself because the process of developing theories cannot be divorced from the product of that process. It will lay out a research agenda for decades to come and will be invaluable reading for any academic in the IS field and related disciplines concerned with information, systems, technology and their management.

The information systems (IS) field represents a multidisciplinary area that links the rapidly changing technology of information (or communications and information technology, ICT) to the business and social environment. Despite the potential that the IS field has to develop its own native theories to address current issues involving ICT it has consistently borrowed theories from its "reference disciplines," often uncritically, to legitimize its research. This volume is the first of a series intended to advance IS research beyond this form of borrowed legitimization and derivative research towards fresh and original research that naturally comes from its own theories. It is inconceivable for a field so relevant to the era of the hyper-connected society, disruptive technologies, big data, social media, "fake news" and the weaponization of information to not be brimming with its own theories. The first step in reaching the goal of developing native IS theories is to reach an agreement on the need for theory (its rationale) and its role as the most distinctive product of human intellectual activity. This volume addresses what theories are, why bother with theories and the process of theorizing itself because the process of developing theories cannot be divorced from the product of that process. It will lay out a research agenda for decades to come and will be invaluable reading for any academic in the IS field and related disciplines concerned with information, systems, technology and their management.

This book is a companion to Global Business: Strategy in Context (ISBN 9780995682085) and takes the learning further into managing the key, functional areas that underpin strategic positioning. It first focuses on the major challenges and ways of running marketing and R&D functions in an international business. The author then gives insights, through frameworks, studies and examples, into how businesses manage organisation structure and architecture; sourcing and the supply chain; information systems and emerging technologies; and human resources, in different parts of the world—globally, regionally and domestically. The book also reviews how an international business can manage exchange rates in the context of the international monetary system. The book provides detailed understanding of challenges and practices in international project and change management, and concludes by establishing future, post–COVID-19, challenges, opportunities and directions for international businesses. Notable features of this title are … • Based on up-to-date research studies. • Reviews the post–COVID-19 shifting global context, changed business priorities and impacts on strategy. • Covers the essential international business management functions. • Includes extensive sections on international project and change management. • Details how the 2020-2021 crises have accelerated the adoption of emerging technologies, and how global digital management can be executed. • Focuses on the future. The book provides management principles for dealing with systemic risk and redesigning an international business for the new (ab)normal.

Singers Die Twice is the story of a life in music. One of Germany's best-known exponents of North Indian classical music, specifically dhrupad singing, Perer Pannke has traveled from his home in Germany to Varanasi, Delhi, Darbhanga, and the forests of Vrindaban to study classical Indian singing in the most famous gharanas-musical houses-of India. His richly woven story takes readers from the legendary beginning of the gharana in the eighteenth century into the last splendid days of the Maharaja of Darbhanga-the inspiration for Satyajit Ray's 1957 classic film, The Music Room-and into the present. Along the way, we meet legendary singers whose names are still known to the devotees of dhrupad: the grand old Pandit Ram Chatur Mallik, the pious and inspiring Pandit Vidur Mallik, and both the masters and the humbler musicians and traveling players who bring music to the fields of Bihar, across India, and beyond. Singers Die Twice is the inspiring story of a master musician in the world that he loves.