Customer Reviews

Agile Systems With Reusable Patterns of Business Knowledge: A Component-Based Approach (Artech House Computing Library)

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An excellent resource for any organization committed to achieving and maintaining the competitive edge. In an age where what is new today is outmoded tomorrow, the principles and practices detailed in this book will be indispensable to companies that want to stay on top.
Theory and practice are explained, helping to ensure that the reader has a thorough understanding of each topic. The authors stress the importance and interrelationship of business knowledge, business practice, people and process in the quest for business excellence.
The goal of agile systems is to ensure the flexibility an organization needs to adapt quickly and effectively to changing demands, whether internal or external. In today's highly competitive market, only those companies that achieve a high level of efficient flexibility will survive; those that go the extra mile will prosper. `Agile Systems' is a vital tool for practitioners working toward this goal.

I have read the book in its original manuscript form and in its entirety. Every business worth the name should have this book. It greatly increases your productivity in a practical sense. The current book does not contain many of the ideas of the original manuscript - yet excellent results are achievable in business process implementation and are simplified. Good reading as well.

Agile Systems by Amit Mitra and Amar Gupta, addresses a major and growing business need: how to better leverage legacy and current knowledge assets in a world characterized by increasing globalization, rapid proliferation of new computer and communications equipment, and fast changing organizational structures. The book focuses on three key themes: business agility, process resilience, and leveraging of corporate knowledge. This three-pronged emphasis is reflected in the full title of this book: Agile Systems with Reusable Patterns of Business Knowledge: A Component-Based Approach.

Using examples from diverse application areas, the book delineates the use of business knowledge to attain major strategic benefits through decomposition of knowledge into components. It highlights how these components of knowledge can be re-configured in step with innovation and new learning, and how business processes and information systems can be designed to automatically flex in step with the evolving configurations of knowledge in support of business agility.

Agility is becoming the most important challenge for the long-term success of businesses. However, current business process engineering, outsourcing, and information system approaches provide inadequate attention to innovation and agility. They only address issues of operational efficiency and economics. The slow, methodically structured manufacturing and mass production paradigms of the industrial age are crumbling under the onslaught of information bolstered by new knowledge. The physical products of the industrial age were fixed, structured and stable; they were developed to fulfill a stable need. The book emphasizes that knowledge and information are inherently unstructured in nature, and need to be handled in new ways in order to gain optimal benefits from them.

Chapter 1 of this book introduces the notion of knowledge in business organizations and applications, and the reuse of knowledge in diverse situations. The text and the accompanying figures provide a rich intuitive mechanism for appreciating the concept of knowledge. Thankfully, the authors have minimized the use of technical jargon in this chapter.

Chapter 2 identifies common patterns and the underlying semantics of business knowledge. The pivotal role of "components" is described in a fashion that emphasizes pragmatism rather than intense mathematical rigor.

Chapter 3 focuses on the idea of a "Knowledge Machine" that incorporates a set of autonomous business models that are geared to adapt to evolving situations and business needs.

Chapter 4 addresses a range of implementation issues, ranging from technical aspects to risk aspects.

Chapter 5 concentrates on the human aspect of the change.

Chapter 6 deals with the process of taking small experimental efforts and broadening their scope to cover the whole organization, as well as to institutionalize the change.

A unique aspect of this book is that it addresses critical issues in a manner that would appeal both to the average person on the street as well as to persons with computer background. The book considers issues the complex issue of how information systems can be designed to better adapt to changing operational needs and market conditions. The suggested strategy involves the reuse and reconfiguration of business knowledge.

The most unique characteristic of this book is that it provides complimentary access to a website that provides huge amounts of supplementary information. As I read the book, I wanted to know more about several issues. I logged on to the website and found the details instantaneously.I wish more authors would adopt this mode of providing auxiliary material at no additional charge.

As we witness increasing globalization, we find that organizations have become more geographically distributed in terms of where goods and services are created, where they are refined, where they are distributed, and where they are consumed. The growing incidence of outsourcing and offshoring make it increasingly important to define new frameworks for knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge dissemination. When one hears of globally distributed projects that need urgent attention because of cost overruns and incomplete deliverables, one should read books like this new one in order to come up with business strategies that can effectively mitigate such problems.

The only minor problem that I encountered in this book is that it uses ideas from many different fields. The breadth of such ideas is indeed amazing. Initially, I thought some of these references were distracting. But as I read more, I could better relate to the diverse concepts. In fact, the diversity of the examples ultimately adds to the value of the book as it helps persons from very different backgrounds to find at least some examples that they can relate to.

Since one of the authors (Mitra) is from industry and the other (Gupta) is from academia, the book strikes a great balance in covering material that is relevant to individuals in businesses as well as in colleges and schools. This book connects business knowledge with process and systems engineering. It is especially appropriate for practitioners and students of Management, systems engineering, industrial engineering, information technology, and computer science.

Scholars stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. Our academic ancestors had the foresight to capture their knowledge in a systematic way, writing sentences in paragraphs, paragraphs in chapters, chapters in books, books in libraries, metadata about books in card catalogs.

If I may be allowed to personify history, just like 'Groundhog Day', history has an innate tendency to repeat itself. Humans are fighting that tendency by creating time capsules filled with knowledge that future generations can utilize in the struggle to retain the lessons of the best and brightest citizens of earth.

Agile systems states a proposition that helps us in our struggle to maintain, organize, and utilize knowledge by establishing a baseline about the nature of knowledge from which we can reason, by leveraging techniques from software development to help taxonomize knowledge (patterns, polymorphism, decomposition, aggregation, composition), and by bringing in a contemporary theory for estimating the effectiveness of an organization relative to the capture and utilization of knowledge (The Capability Maturity Model).

I found the book to be a creative presentation of a very difficult topic. Additionally, the authors have taken great care to provide good analogies, and to maintain a multicultural approach. Agile Systems provides a practical epistemology, complete with inspirational and timely excerpts from great philosophical teachings.

I highly recommend Agile Systems - an inspiring glimpse into a global world - for Information Technologists in search of a higher meaning for the product of their work.