An Executive Guide to Data Management

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

"In Secrets of Software Success, the authors investigate the software industry's best practices in order to develop a complete picture of what it takes to build a thriving software business."--BOOK JACKET. "Drawing on an exclusive worldwide survey of more than 100 global software companies and 450 top executives, Secrets of Software Success presents the first panoramic view of the conditions that influence results for both the product and the service sides of the software industry."--BOOK JACKET.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

An innovative approach to winning more profitable sales in the growing professional services industry In recent years, professional services providers have had to rethink their sales methods and adapt to profound changes in the way clients buy services. In response, Winning the Professional Services Sale argues for fundamental changes in the seller's mindset and sales strategies. Rather than pressing the sale, salespeople must help clients buy--the way that works best for each client. This new approach gives buyers what they now want in a services seller: a consultative problem solver, change agent, and solution integrator, all rolled into one. Author Michael McLaughlin presents a strategy for winning new business with a holistic approach to each client relationship. Only by fully understanding a sale from every angle, including its impact on the client's business and career, can salespeople thrive in the new era of the service economy.

This textbook offers undergraduate students an introduction to the main principles and some of the most popular techniques that constitute ‘software quality assurance’. The book seeks to engage students by placing an emphasis on the underlying foundations of modern quality-assurance techniques , using these to highlight why techniques work, as opposed to merely focussing on how they work. In doing so it provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of where software quality fits into the development lifecycle (spoiler: everywhere), and what the key quality assurance activities are. The book focuses on quality assurance in a way that typical, more generic software engineering reference books do not. It is structured so that it can (and should) be read from cover to cover throughout the course of a typical university module. Specifically, it is Concise: it is small enough to be readable in its entirety over the course of a typical software engineering module. Explanatory: topics are discussed not merely in terms of what they are, but also why they are the way they are – what events, technologies, and individuals or organisations helped to shape them into what they are now. Applied: topics are covered with a view to giving the reader a good idea of how they can be applied in practice, and by pointing, where possible, to evidence of their efficacy. The book starts from some of the most general notions (e.g. quality and development process), and gradually homes-in on the more specific activities, assuming knowledge of the basic notions established in prior chapters. Each chapter concludes with a “Key Points” section, summarising the main issues that have been covered in the chapter. Throughout the book there are exercises that serve to remind readers of relevant parts in the book that have been covered previously, and give them the opportunity to reflect on a particular topic and refer to related references.