Agile Information Systems: Conceptualization, Construction, and Management Paperback – 30 Aug 2006

Review

"In today's information intensive global economy, large organizations face a wealth of challenges as they wrestle with resolving the tensions between coordinating globally and responding locally. As a result, a prime consideration of major enterprises is to find an organizational design that enables them to accommodate these joint goals. Not surprisingly, given the volume of information that organizations need to process to synchronize globally and react locally, information systems play a key role in enabling pursuit of this dual goal. The acceleration of the shifting plates of social, economic, political, and competitive forces magnifies the need for effective information systems. Thus, the search for organizational agility is intricately linked to and highly dependent on an enterprises ability to build agile information systems that support nimble managers and employees in adapting to and foreseeing changing circumstances Humans are the critical success factor of agility. No organizational design or information system can overcome rigid, closed thinking. The agile mind is the determining driver. This book is food for nurturing an agile mind. It stimulates thinking about agility and galvanizes the neurons that need to be engaged to build agile organizations and information systems."
--Richard T. Watson, J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy, Director, Center for Information System Leadership, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia

"This book makes an explosive break from the past. It takes you from the Old World to the New World; from the clanking Industrial Age of the mid-50s to the New Age and 21st Century; from adaptive response to preemptive initiatives. You know about "just in time" inventory control, yes? This book develops the idea of "agile information organizations" doing just in time strategy and organizing. Agile organizing means just in time: sensing of signals from the environment; data and information processing; mobilization of resources; learning; doing all of this in quick time with minimal cost and effort. This kind of thinking and organizing allows firms to switch from adapting post-hoc to their changing environment to preemptive changes that put them in the driver's seat of industry evolution. It's about getting there first rather than following along behind. Collectively, its 20 chapters uncover drastic changes facing managers: Information is fleeting and emergent. Databases are obsolete. Work has shifted from stable routines to ephemeral global complexity. Basic artifacts of technology are open source and distributed between firm and customers.

Managers and researchers are used to a world of dinosaurs. No more! This book pulls them into a world of socioeconomic viruses and bacteria-fast changing, hard to grab hold of, and dangerous if ignored. This change is fundamental, profound, and upon us. Desouza's is the best book on fast moving organizing that I have seen."
-- Bill McKelvey, Professor of Strategic Organizing, Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles