economics-software

This book offers no real insight for people who have been involved in the life cycle of either enterprise / "shrink wrapped" software. The book primarily deals with issues that would be common knowledge to most people who have worked in these roles for even a short period of time. It might have been better if the author had included real life scenarios of product management failures / successes and provided some sort of "analysis". Since this book provides neither depth nor breadth, I would classify this book as an utter disappointment.

Having been in software for the last 20 years at Sun, Novell and Microsoft, I was at first a bit skeptical about this book. However, after reading it, I would highly recommend it to both novice and experienced software professionals - all the way from programmers to developers to marketers to sales to management. This is a great reference on how the whole process works and how you can add value. A must read for anyone in the software business.

I would say this book is a great look at software product management for professionals of all levels. The book stays true to its summary (see above) and is an overall great reference. Even though I have been a CTO for 6 years now, I found a lot in the book that was very useful. My staff also found the book very useful. I highly recommend this book.

This is one of what I see as an emerging series of books aimed at delving into the management and operations of CI professionals and CI units. For the past two decades, the vast volume of published books have focused on what CI is, what it can do, how to do data collection better, how to improve analytical techniques, etc. Now we have a book, written just for the CI professional, as well as the IT manager, on how to select the right kind of software for a CI unit.

Our editor, Bonnie Hohhof, wisely suggested that I compare the approach here with that in a recent issue of CIM, Robert Chamberlain and Ho Davies, "A Framework for Evaluation CI Technologies" (vol. 6:2, March/April 2003). For those that do not recall that piece, the authors sought to build and then apply a "simple, easy-to-use" framework to help CI managers evaluate competing technologies. It presumes that the readers understand what CI is, and how it operates. From there, they use a four-step approach to produce an evaluation framework.

Assessing Competitive Intelligence Software adopts a similar approach, but drives much deeper into the issues. First, it starts by analyzing the various systems currently in use by IT professionals to compare software for business applications. From them, it develops a composite system that they can apply to CI software.

Then, they turn to the CI process. Relying on some of the key works and authors on modern CI, they, in essence, deconstruct CI to lay bare its internal workings. From that, they then develop an information-processing model of the CI cycle. That model alone (p. 43) is an important addition to the understanding of the CI process, and one to which I would draw the attention of those teaching CI at the college and higher levels.

Returning to the world of information processing, the authors identify and then explain the value-added processes in CI. They conclude by listing all of the separate criteria that make up their evaluation criteria process. (pp. 115 et seq.). If the book stopped here, it would be an important acquisition for the CI and IT manager. But the book then takes these analytical frameworks and applies them to several existing, identified, software packages. While they conclude that "it is fair to state the CI software has not yet delivered what the manufacturers claim." the authors are not negative. They clearly believe that better software is being developed every day, and have provided a disciplined and thorough way for the CI manager, working with the IT professional, to select among today and tomorrow's software options.

Written by John McGonagle, book reviewer for Competitive Intelligence Magazine. Review excerpted from the November/December issue, published by SCIP www.scip.org

It is now perhaps a cliche to say that the nature of business has changed. With the rise of the Internet, increased globalization, and advances in financial engineering, both large and small companies have to keep abreast of trends at shorter and shorter time scales. The volatility of the marketplace has sent the business environment into a roller coaster ride of confidence and anxiety, and so it is imperative that sophisticated tools be brought in to handle gigantic market swings. These tools can take the form of software, and go by the name of competitive intelligence (CI). The goal of this book is to evaluate this software based on certain criteria that the authors think is important. It is one of the first books on the evaluation of competitive intelligence software, and is successful in cutting through the advertising hype that frequently accompanies this software.

Competitive intelligence for the authors is a process that involves using publicly available information in order to learn various things about competitor, and to understand this information thoroughly. They assert, correctly, that the information that is gained must be transformed in order to make it useful for decision making and to induce changes or actions in a particular company.

In chapter 1, the authors attempt to clarify the meaning of "value-added information" in the use of CI. One would think that this would be a difficult notion to clarify, and this is certainly correct. The authors approach the problem by attempting to define just what "information" and "intelligence" are, as well as "data" and "knowledge". Such definitions could be deep and might degenerate into philosophical discussion, but the authors do a fairly good job of keeping the discussion relatively concrete. This discussion leads them to distinguish between the roles played by information specialists, CI professionals, and experts. An information specialist acquires access to information resources, CI practitioners assign values to its content, and experts decide the action to be taken. The authors though recognize that the boundaries between these roles can be blurred. After a modest review of the literature, the authors assert that value-added processes are ones that offer the means to see the potential of information and to relate it to problems in specific environments.

The authors attempt to construct a conceptual framework for CI in chapter 2, after giving a literature survey of attempts to do so. As expected, the laissez faire nature of industry in the US made the nature of its CI very different from the CI of Japan or Europe. The authors are careful to distinguish between CI and "industrial spying", and clarify the difference between it and business and marketing intelligence. Different analytical techniques, such as personality profiling and scenario development, are discussed in terms of their ability to guide information requirements. In addition, they emphasize the need for reliable filtering mechanisms that will eliminate false information about a competitor. The most interesting discussion in this chapter concerns the analysis of the obtained information, for this is where techniques from artificial intelligence could be used. Such techniques are not discussed in the book, but the authors do summarize the eight most popular analysis techniques for CI.

In chapter 3, the authors begin their evaluation of CI software, with the main goal being to find out whether it can allow users to achieve their intended goals. Their evaluation criteria are aimed at identifying the value-added processes that should take place when a CI application is used to transform information into intelligence. The authors stress early on that CI software needs to be evaluated beyond the "recall" and "precision" criteria used to evaluate information retrieval systems. The dynamical nature of competitive information is the main reason for this, as typical databases are not refreshed at short enough time scales. CI systems also must assist in the analysis of information, not merely retrieve it. The value-added framework of R.S. Taylor, one of the early CI specialists, is used throughout this chapter, and the rest of the book, to evaluate CI software. Based on the Taylor model, the author presents 38 criteria for evaluating CI software, and discuss them in fair detail. One of these criteria is particularly interesting, in that it involves "closeness to the problem", a very difficult concept to quantify, but one which is also very important in other fields, such as artificial intelligence. And, by the way, the use of artificial intelligence will soften the need for a "sixth sense" that the authors mention is a necessary ability for CI specialists to have in order to analyze information. Indeed, recent advances in natural language "paraphrasing" will be of enormous importance in the need for summarizing acquired information.

Finally, in chapter 4, the authors begin evaluating the software packages available for CI. The authors list three selection criteria for distinguishing CI from other types of software, and six applications that meet these criteria. In chapter 5 the authors present a set of equations to allow more rigorous evaluation of CI software. Their goal was to compare these packages relative to their information-processing capability, and not rank them. It is readily apparent when reading this chapter that the authors took great care in their evaluation of the packages, which certainly must have been a time-consuming effort. Many problems shared by all the packages are discussed, including their lack of tools for monitoring the relevance of content through time, the lack of mechanisms for filtering information, and the poor performance of the packages when dealing with acquisition of knowledge. In addition, the authors conclude that the analytical capabilities of the packages, i.e. their ability to transform information into intelligence, are almost non-existent. Such capabilities, they argue, require human intelligence, and this is an interesting comment if comparison is made to recent advances in artificial intelligence. The authors remark that these packages are far from being intelligent, and that such intelligence is needed in order to make CI a viable technology, which in their opinion currently is not.

Librarians and any involved in commercial software products for competitive intelligence will find this collection of reviews and surveys to be an exceptional guide presenting a systematic method businesses and collections can use to evaluate CI software independently. This could have been reviewed in our business books section but also holds applicability to librarians and others involved in the information technology industry, providing an important background on competitive intelligence applications and methodology.

Based on the title and description of this book, I bought it hoping to learn more about developing financial tools, specifically interest rate models, in Matlab. After working through most of the book, I have concluded that the use of the name "Matlab" in the title is misleading: it only means that Maple, the main tool of the book, may be accessed via the kernel of Matlab.

The book appears to be targeted primarily at undergraduates and MBA students, not practitioners in the field. Such an audience may have little interest (or need) in learning to develop code or the intricacies of the underlying mechanics of financial models, and for them, the book would no doubt be very helpful. The software that comes with the book includes a stripped down version of Maple, (which is nice, since you can't really use the book without it), and author-developed analytical tools. These tools support the goals of learning through the ability to quickly vary inputs and see the impact on the output, but as they are more or less a black-box, do not add much to one's independent ability to model new financial objects or extend existing ones.

The book includes the de rigueur definitions of typical financial instruments and explanations that facilitate understanding of these instruments (such as how to read and understand option data in newspapers, the mechanics of currency swaps and so on), but one really has to follow along with the Maple commands page by page to derive benefit. The fixed income section is very skimpy. It seems like the book is best suited as an extended set of lecture notes.

I like the book but would not recommend it to practioners looking for insight on tool development or to extend knowledge of cutting edge interest rate models (as these are not covered here). I would recommend it for newcomers to the field having mathematical or quantitative backgrounds who want a reasonably good introduction to financial instruments. It would also be useful as a companion text in master's programs in financial engineering or financial mathematics. Derivatives and Maple with training wheels.

The theory of financial derivates is now much easily understood by combining mathemtical models with the symbolic, numeric and visualization capabilities of a CAS such as Maple. The author made an excellent choice to select Maple (primarily) and Matlab. Maple is used extensively in many academic and industry settings, and its integration into the presentation of the materials makes the content come alive. Great addition, that (even) every mathematician should read! I highly recommend it.

For when life throws you that derivative that you just can't look up in some book...
This book provides the building blocks on both the practical and theoretical levels that one needs to price derivatives. The book provides an essential combination of three things: 1) clear explanations and examples of fundamental concepts, 2) a hands on approach to software and pricing algorithms, and 3) emphasis on graphic visualization in understanding the behavior of derivatives in general. While clearly a textbook for a Master's level course, from the point of view of a practitioner, this book has also become my first reference source at the office for those times when I can't just look up the answer, and have to resort to first principles.

In the preface, the editor explains that this collection of essays arose from a "brainstorming session for a conference of the same name." As you'd expect with over a dozen authors, the results are uneven. If you're involved in software development, the following chapters will justify your purchase of the book:

- Don Gray: "Solving Other People's Problems"

- S.M. & K. Roberts: "Do I want to Take This Crunch Project?"

- Gerald Weinberg: "Congruent Interviewing by Audition"

- Johanna Rothman: "It's Just the First Slip"

Although the critical reader may find some other sections offering commonplace or occasional misguided advice, the whole book is stimulating and easy to read in one sitting. Recommended for your project-management shelf.

Since it is not possible to extend the length of the day, the only hope to improve your efficiency is to improve what you do with this most limited of resources. Working extended overtime has proven to be a short term solution only, as with few exceptions extended overtime leads to a general drop in productivity. The only situation where extended overtime does not appear to be a self-defeating condition is when the work is challenging enough so that it becomes a legitimate combination of livelihood, hobby and recreation. Tall order indeed!
However, the situation is not impossible if you simply take the time to explore the ways in which you can save time. The first and foremost way is to reduce the number of simultaneous projects. Study after study has demonstrated that the term momentary distraction is a gross misnomer. Any interruption takes us off task for at least ten minutes and the best essay in this book describes the plight of a man named Sam. Overseeing several projects that would each individually take only a few weeks, the constant switching created a near deadlock state in his managerial life. The simple solution is to declare one the highest priority and concentrate on it alone until it was complete. Repeating this simple process removed the deadlock and all projects were completed in a short time.
The simplest way that work can be made fun is to make the surrounding interpersonal interactions pleasant. The most interesting work in the world will not make a job fun if the interpersonal atmosphere is poisonous. This involves both selecting the right people as well as helping them enjoy each other through the emotional ups and downs of the long haul of building a major project. In my experience conducting technical interviews, the advice here of having candidates audition is the right way to select the people you want. If someone cannot handle the auditioning of their supposed skills, then it is difficult to see how they can survive the pressure of working closely and intensely with others for months at a time. The second and by far the most difficult is how to walk the fine line of allowing for individual differences without letting the differences become too individual. The advice here is good, but one could write volumes on how to practice this critical art.
As a group, IT workers commonly work 50-60 hour weeks filled with "crisis" after "crisis." The only hope to break this destructive cycle is to either cut the hours or make them more fun, and there is sound advice in this book that will help you do both.

The book is helpful, but expensive and outdated due to the continual release of software versions from each vendor. I found most of the research to be inadequate due to this time problem. You are better of researching the solutions yourself or you can get help from the authorities, Balanced Scorecard Collaborative...on the subject since they invented the topic and certify the software. They have an automated decision support product that can help you make a selection based on the most up-to-date research possible.

This book enabled us to select the right performance measurement solution for our organization in just one week. Without the report we would have been completely lost.

Chinese tech firm is an oxymoron, right? Not at all, according to this intriguing work by the late professor Qiwen Lu. This book, fascinating at times, offers an in-depth look at four successful Chinese tech enterprises. Taking each of the four as a case study, Lu thoroughly illustrates the challenges facing a bureaucracy attempting to break into a fast-changing industry. In spite of its good points, Lu's book isn't perfect. The text is laden with jargon, and at times it's difficult to understand exactly how these enterprises are organized. Still, there's plenty to like about this book. We at getAbstract recommend it to anyone interested in emerging economies, technology or international trade, or to anyone willing to have their expectations overturned.

This book is the product of a remarkably well informed observer, packed full of insights that anyone interested in the Chinese economy and in high technology should know. Qiwen was a real insider in China, Harvard educated and with extraordinary connections in China. Unfortunately, Prof. Lu died just prior to its publication. I believe it was his first book. The loss is incalculable.

This is a good introduction to working in a team and using good software engineering techniques such as planning and inspections. It is geared for undergraduate students, therefore the managerial roles have been created. This would probably not work out of the box for an organization that is already set up. For students, the manager roles give each team member ownership in the product while making sure each aspect of good engineering has an advocate.

The processes are written as scripts. These are very easy to follow and take the guesswork out of how to do each step in the lifecycle.

This is a process book therefore there is not a lot of technically-oriented information in the book. For example, the book tells you that you must design your software. It does not give many guidelines on what a good (object-oriented, client-server, real time, etc.) design might look like. In addition, some of the data bookkeeping is long and involved. A good tool would help with this.

Overall, this is a good tutorial and a good reference book. I used this book as a graduate student, and I continue to pull ideas out of it for use in my work.

I've been involved with many different projects in a team environment. This book contains some of the best and most respected procedures to complete a team project. I've used these methods and they work well! The principles outlined in this book apply to more than just software engineering. Take a look! You'll be glad you did!

Investments by Frank Reilly. This college level text is a wonderful source of information for beginning investors as well as seasoned Registered Representatives. The material is presented in a fashion that is easily understood with several examples and stories to illustrate the theories and practices of all investments. Not only does this book cover the traditional topics of Equity and Debt investments it also covers the ins and outs of futures, commodities, derivatives, currency and precious metals. The first chapters lead off with an indepth explanation of the markets for each investment and how investments get to market. The techinical discussion of bringing an issue to market and the financing of corporate america is very helpful and enlightening. 13 years after graduating with a degree in Finance I still refer to this excellent work by Frank Reilly for everyday information.

It is a text book vs a simple reading book, however the author has done an excellent job of presenting the concepts in simple to understand format. With well writtem text and informative graphs the concepts easy to understand. Covers all types in investments instruments from stocks, bonds, options, futures and portfolio construction.

The book is written by people who are clearly aware of the issues involved in commercial multimedia production. It is well laid out and covers most topics - surprisingly it does not suffer too much from its age. Many of the tips and checklists remain valid even though the technology has moved on considerably since 1996. The text has been used on the very successful multimedia programme at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.

Any relevant subject about multimedia projects has been covered in a thorough way. It is a good combination of theory and practice. The checklists are very usefull as well.

The book covers MRP in a great deal of length. However, contents are suitable for beginners and intermediate level MRP practitioners. Researchers won't find the book very useful. The high cost of this book is not justified. If you are looking for good contents regardless of the price, do buy this book.

I think, this book is good