In a world of fierce global competition and rapid technological change, traditional strategies for gaining market share and achieving efficiencies no longer yield the returns they once did. How can companies drive consumer preference and secure sustainable growth in this digital, social, and mobile age? The answer is through functional integration. Some of the world's most highly valued companies—including Amazon, Apple and Google—have harnessed this new business model to build highly interactive ecosystems of interrelated products and digital services, gaining new levels of customer engagement. Functional integration offers forward-looking brands a unique competitive edge by using transformative digital technologies to deliver high-value customer experiences, generate repeat business, and unlock lucrative new business-to-business revenue streams. Connected By Design is the first book to show business leaders and marketers exactly how to use functional integration to achieve transformative growth within any type of company. Based on R/GA's pioneering work with firms at the forefront of functional integration, Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman identify seven principles companies must follow in order to create and deliver new value for customers and capture new revenues. Connected By Design explains how functional integration drove the transformation of market-leading companies as diverse as Nike, General Motors, McCormick & Co., and Activision to establish authentic brand relationships with their customers, enter new categories, and develop new sources of income. With Connected by Design, any company can leverage technological disruption to redefine its mission and foster greater brand loyalty and engagement.

This book provides a proven approach to EAI, offering examples from actual practice, and exploring the steps to follow for its day-to-day implementation. Originally designed for companies undergoing significant merger and acquisition activity, Integration Models have evolved into a working toolkit for bridging the gap between business and technical models. In clear terms, this book provides a catalog of templates, discussing how they address various types of integration problems. Accompanying case studies and examples from actual practice demonstrate how to apply integration models in a range of different EAI settings. Examples are taken from major corporations in diverse industries including: Telecommunication Transportation Financial Services Employment Services Insurance Internet Services Wireless Services

The book investigates the scope and limitations of the transformative power of EU enlargement in the Western Balkans. The extension of EU enlargement policy to the region has generated high expectations that enlargement will regulate democratic institution-building and foster reform, much as it did in Central and Eastern Europe. However, there is very little research on whether and how unfavourable domestic conditions might mitigate the transformative power of the EU. This volume investigates the role of domestic factors, identifying ‘stateness’ as the missing link between the assumed transformative power of the EU and the actual capacity to adopt EU rules across the region. Including chapters on Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, leading scholars in the field offer up-to-date comparative analysis of key areas of institutional and policy reform; including state bureaucracy, rule of law, electoral management, environmental governance, cooperation with the International Court of Justice, economic liberalization and foreign policy. Looking to the future and the implications for policy change, European Integration and Transformation in the Western Balkans provides a new theoretical and empirical focus on this little understood area. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of EU politics, comparative democratisation, post-communist transitions and Balkan area studies.

This book seeks to build a shared understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the global business scenario today and in the near future. Drawing on academic theory and real-world case studies, it examines AI’s development and application across a number of business contexts. Taking current scholarship forward in its engagement with AI theory and practice for enterprises and applied research and innovation, it outlines international practices for the promotion of reliable AI systems, trends, research and development, fostering a digital ecosystem for AI and preparing companies for job transformation and building skills. This book will be of great interest to academics studying Digital Business, Digital Strategy, Innovation Management, and Information Technology.

Marja-Leena Stenstrom ̈ and Pai ̈ vi Tynjal ̈ a ̈ Changing Working Life as a Challenge to Education Recentmacro-leveltrends,suchaseconomicglobalisation,thedevelopmentofthe- formationsociety,changesinmethodsofproductionandtheorganisationofwork,and the growing signi?cance of knowledge as a factor of production, have created a new context for the relationship between education and working life. In this new context, the use of work experience as an educational and learning strategy has become one ofthemostimportantdevelopmentsbothinvocationaleducationandtraining(VET) and in higher education. Although the tradition of making work an integral part of education has varied at different levels of the educational system, the challenges that systems of education currently face are very similar in many respects. These include thechallengeofequivalenceasregardsthelevelofacademicstandards,thechallenge ofdevelopingpedagogicalpracticesfordifferentformsofwork-relatedlearning,and the impact that work-related learning has on the identity of the educational orga- sation, the teacher, and the learner. The diversity of the systems through which work experience is realised, the varying levels of training of workplace trainers, and the lack of industrial experience of vocational school teachers have aroused discussion abouthowtoguaranteeandassessthequalityofthelearningtakingplaceindifferent workplaces and of the work-based learning system as a whole. (See e. g. Boud & Solomon, 2001, p. 27; Grif?ths & Guile, 2004; Guile &Grif?ths, 2001. ) The key pedagogical question regarding collaboration between education and work is how to build a ?rm connection between theory and practice or abstract thinking and practical action – and between the development of general skills and speci?c vocational skills.

The concept of transformation has long been known to the sciences and has been around in the popular vocabulary for several decades. Because it has never been fully developed as a managed process and applied to our organizations, the way in which we have been trying to deal with the complex issues we face today is looking increasingly inadequate. Transformation management, argue the authors of this inspirational book, now provides the opportunity for the application of the first significant world-wide innovation in the way we manage since Drucker put management itself on the map in the 1950s. In a book that draws on seminal theses and practical examples from the four corners of the world, Ronnie Lessem and Alexander Schieffer provide leaders, students of leadership, managers and change agents with a trans-culturally tested, integrated approach to leadership and management. Only through a redefinition of what leadership, management and entrepreneurship amount to, say the authors, can organizations be transformed into sustainable enterprises capable of dealing with the burning issues of our time. Leaders are coming to realise that it is no longer possible for organizations to operate in any sort of isolation from the society and the wider world in which they exist, but paying lip service to notions of either social responsibility or globality is not good enough. From this indispensable book, those whose enterprises are to have any hope of becoming authentically socially responsible or authentically global will learn to understand and activate the process that dynamically links any organization with the society in which it is embedded and that links the local with the global. The practice of transformation management is about creating real value... for organizations, people, and society. This book, from the Transformation and Innovation Series, makes that practice possible.

The organization pursuing digital transformation must embrace new ways to use and deploy integration technologies, so they can move quickly in a manner appropriate to the goals of multicloud, decentralization, and microservices. The integration layer must transform to allow organizations to move boldly in building new customer experiences, rather than forcing models for architecture and development that pull away from maximizing the organization's productivity. Many organizations have started embracing agile application techniques, such as microservice architecture, and are now seeing the benefits of that shift. This approach complements and accelerates an enterprise's API strategy. Businesses should also seek to use this approach to modernize their existing integration and messaging infrastructure to achieve more effective ways to manage and operate their integration services in their private or public cloud. This IBM® Redbooks® publication explores the merits of what we refer to as agile integration; a container-based, decentralized, and microservice-aligned approach for integration solutions that meets the demands of agility, scalability, and resilience required by digital transformation. It also discusses how the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration marks a significant leap forward in integration technology by embracing both a cloud-native approach and container technology to achieve the goals of agile integration. The target audiences for this book are cloud integration architects, IT specialists, and application developers.