"The Baltzan and Phillips approach in Business Driven Information Systems discusses various business initiatives first and how technology supports those initiatives second. The premise for this unique approach is that business initiatives drive technology choices in a corporation. Therefore, every discussion addresses the business needs first and addresses the technology that supports those needs second. This approach takes the difficult and often intangible MIS concepts, brings them down to the student's level, and applies them using a hands-on approach to reinforce the concepts. BDIS provides the foundation that will enable students to achieve excellence in business, whether they major in operations management, manufacturing, sales, marketing, etc. BDIS is designed to give students the ability to understand how information technology can be a point of strength in an organization."--Publisher's website.

Business Driven Information Systems, 4e discusses various business initiatives first and how technology supports those initiatives second. The premise for this unique approach is that business initiatives should drive technology choices. Every discussion first addresses the business needs and then addresses the technology that supports those needs. This updated edition provides the foundation that will enable students to achieve excellence in business through its updated case studies, closing cases, technology plug-ins, expanded IT topics, and new project management content. Business Driven Information Systems is designed to give students the ability to understand how information technology can be a point of strength for an organization, and McGraw-Hill’s online learning and assessment solution, Connect MIS, helps students apply this knowledge. For more information on Baltzan, Business Driven Information Systems, 4e, please visit: www.mhhe.com/baltzan4e For more information on Connect, please visit: connect.mcgraw-hill.com For more information on SIMnet for Office 2013, please visit www.simnetkeepitsimple.com

Conventional wisdom on strategy is no longer a reliable guide. In Essential Advantage, Booz & Company's Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with coherence: a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique. Achieving this clarity takes a sharpness of focus that only exceptional companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm's blend of strategic direction and distinctive capabilities that give it the "right to win" in its chosen markets. Based on extensive research and filled with company examples--including Amazon.com, Johnson & Johnson, Tata Sons, and Procter & Gamble--Essential Advantage helps you construct a coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes. The authors reveal: · Why you should focus on a system of a few aligned capabilities · How to identify the "way to play" in your market · How to design a strategy for well-modulated growth · How to align a portfolio of businesses behind your capability system · How your strategy clarifies growth, costs, and people decisions Few companies achieve a capability-driven "right to win" in their market. This book helps you position your firm to be among them.

The increasing penetration of IT in organizations calls for an integrative perspective on enterprises and their supporting information systems. MERODE offers an intuitive and practical approach to enterprise modelling and using these models as core for building enterprise information systems. From a business analyst perspective, benefits of the approach are its simplicity and the possibility to evaluate the consequences of modeling choices through fast prototyping, without requiring any technical experience. The focus on domain modelling ensures the development of a common language for talking about essential business concepts and of a shared understanding of business rules. On the construction side, experienced benefits of the approach are a clear separation between specification and implementation, more generic and future-proof systems, and an improved insight in the cost of changes. A first distinguishing feature is the method’s grounding in process algebra provides clear criteria and practical support for model quality. Second, the use of the concept of business events provides a deep integration between structural and behavioral aspects. The clear and intuitive semantics easily extend to application integration (COTS software and Web Services). Students and practitioners are the book’s main target audience, as both groups will benefit from its practical advice on how to create complete models which combine structural and behavioral views of a system-to-be and which can readily be transformed into code, and on how to evaluate the quality of those models. In addition, researchers in the area of conceptual or enterprise modelling will find a concise overview of the main findings related to the MERODE project. The work is complemented by a wealth of extra material on the author’s web page at KU Leuven, including a free CASE tool with code generator, a collection of cases with solutions, and a set of domain modelling patterns that have been developed on the basis of the method’s use in industry and government.

"Essential System Requirements targets the discovery and definition of critical system requirements in the analysis phase of system development - where good design is vital to the success of a project. This book explores a design methodology that involves users early on to describe essential business events. These events then partition the system response into logical, more easily managed segments. The result is a conceptual model that reflects real business needs and accelerates the entire delivery process."--BOOK JACKET.