In Making Silicon Valley, Christophe Lécuyer shows that the explosive growth of the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley was the culmination of decades of growth and innovation in the San Francisco-area electronics industry.
Much of the business transacted on the Web today takes place through information exchanges made possible by using documents as interfaces. For example, what seems to be a simple purchase from an online bookstore actually involves at least three different business collaborations—between the customer and the online catalog to select a book; between the bookstore and a credit card authorization service to verify and charge the customer's account; and between the bookstore and the delivery service with instructions for picking up and delivering the book to the customer.
The American economy has experienced renewed growth since 1995, with this surge rooted in the development and deployment of information technology (IT). This book traces the American growth resurgence to its sources within individual industries, documents the critical role of IT, and shows how U.S. investment in IT has important parallels in other developed countries.
Innovators across all sectors of society are using information and communication technology to reshape economic and social activity. Even after the boom—and despite the bust—the process of structural change continues across organizational boundaries. Transforming Enterprise considers the implications of this change from a balanced, post-bust perspective.
This book offers a comprehensive introduction to workflow management, the management of business processes with information technology. By defining, analyzing, and redesigning an organization?s resources and operations, workflow management systems ensure that the right information reaches the right person or computer application at the right time. The book provides a basic overview of workflow terminology and organization, as well as detailed coverage of workflow modeling with Petri nets.
Use of Beowulf clusters (collections of off-the-shelf commodity computers programmed to act in concert, resulting in supercomputer performance at a fraction of the cost) has spread far and wide in the computational science community. Many application groups are assembling and operating their own "private supercomputers" rather than relying on centralized computing centers. Such clusters are used in climate modeling, computational biology, astrophysics, and materials science, as well as non-traditional areas such as financial modeling and entertainment.
Failed or abandoned software development projects cost the U.S. economy alone billions of dollars a year. In Software Development Failures, Kweku Ewusi-Mensah offers an empirically grounded study that suggests why these failures happen and how they can be avoided. Case studies analyzed include the well-known Confirm travel industry reservation program, FoxMeyer's Delta, the IRS's Tax System Modernization, the Denver International Airport's Baggage Handling System, and CODIS.
Software has gone from obscurity to indispensability in less than fifty years. Although other industries have followed a similar trajectory, software and its supporting industry are different. In this book the authors explain, from a variety of perspectives, how software and the software industry are different—technologically, organizationally, and socially.
Today's rapid growth in information technology has occurred without a full understanding of the human consequences of its use—on individuals, on organizations, and on society as a whole. As a result, initial expectations have frequently not been met, and a backlash has developed. Clearly a more realistic approach to information technology is needed, and applied psychology can offer great help in this effort.
Over the past thirty years, many people have proclaimed the imminent arrival of the paperless office. Yet even the World Wide Web, which allows almost any computer to read and display another computer’s documents, has increased the amount of printing done. The use of e-mail in an organization causes an average 40 percent increase in paper consumption. In The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper use the study of paper as a way to understand the work that people do and the reasons they do it the way they do.
