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AGILE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
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Conceptualization, Construction, and Management
To order this title, and for more information, click here
By
Kevin Desouza, Assitant Professor, Information School, University of Washington, author of over 100 articles in information and knowledge management
and numerous books, and founding faculty member of the Institute for Innovation Management at University of Washington
Reviews
"In today's information intensive global economy, large organizations face a wealth of challenges as they wrestle with resolving the tensions
between coordinating globally and responding locally. As a result, a prime consideration of major enterprises is to find an organizational
design that enables them to accommodate these joint goals. Not surprisingly, given the volume of information that organizations need
to process to synchronize globally and react locally, information systems play a key role in enabling pursuit of this dual goal. The
acceleration of the shifting plates of social, economic, political, and competitive forces magnifies the need for effective information
systems. Thus, the search for organizational agility is intricately linked to and highly dependent on an enterprises ability to build
agile information systems that support nimble managers and employees in adapting to and foreseeing changing circumstances Humans are
the critical success factor of agility. No organizational design or information system can overcome rigid, closed thinking. The agile
mind is the determining driver. This book is food for nurturing an agile mind. It stimulates thinking about agility and galvanizes the
neurons that need to be engaged to build agile organizations and information systems."
--Richard T. Watson, J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished
Chair for Internet Strategy, Director, Center for Information System Leadership, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia
"This
book makes an explosive break from the past. It takes you from the Old World to the New World; from the clanking Industrial Age of the
mid-50s to the New Age and 21st Century; from adaptive response to preemptive initiatives. You know about "just in time" inventory control,
yes? This book develops the idea of "agile information organizations" doing just in time strategy and organizing. Agile organizing means
just in time: sensing of signals from the environment; data and information processing; mobilization of resources; learning; doing all
of this in quick time with minimal cost and effort. This kind of thinking and organizing allows firms to switch from adapting post-hoc
to their changing environment to preemptive changes that put them in the driver's seat of industry evolution. It's about getting there
first rather than following along behind. Collectively, its 20 chapters uncover drastic changes facing managers: Information is fleeting
and emergent. Databases are obsolete. Work has shifted from stable routines to ephemeral global complexity. Basic artifacts of technology
are open source and distributed between firm and customers.
Managers and researchers are used to a world of dinosaurs. No more! This
book pulls them into a world of socioeconomic viruses and bacteria?fast changing, hard to grab hold of, and dangerous if ignored. This
change is fundamental, profound, and upon us. Desouza's is the best book on fast moving organizing that I have seen."
-- Bill McKelvey,
Professor of Strategic Organizing, Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles
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