This work aims to serve the manager or executive who needs a solid grounding in the variety of information technology available today. Throughout the work, the authors present brief synopses of different technology clusters, and where helpful, include URLs as examples, or links to further information on the topic. The organization of the book is arranged into six chapters, each approximately 50 pages in length. These can be read linearly, from start to finish, or by skipping around by topic at point of need. The first chapter provides a foundational overview of the history of the World Wide Web, from 1993 to present, highlighting the major innovations over that time period: web browsers, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML), search paradigms, and the development of e-commerce. The chapter next takes a bit of a detour to tell the story of hardware and networking developments, mobile technology development, and the development of community on the Internet, including blogs, wikis, social networks, and crowd-based development, funding, and future orientation.
Chapter 2 tackles digital information technologies, cast primarily around the context of business: business process reengineering, cloud computing and virtualization, and managing big data. It finishes with a brief discussion on technology integration and appliances. I think the virtualization and cloud computing and the big data sections are particularly well done here; these are complex topics and are written about here for the novice, without reducing needed information or required coverage.
Chapter 3, “IT and the Consumer,” rejoins the e-commerce discussion from chapter 1 in much greater detail and nuance. Beginning with a longer discussion of commercialization of the web, and ending with a case study on the emergence and later dominance of Amazon, the chapter moves into building on previous topics in greater detail: big data analytics, mobile and social commerce, social media technology and marketing, and online advertising. This chapter ends with recommendation systems including content-based recommenders, collaborative filtering, and e-government as exemplars of this area.
Chapter 4 moves to cover “IT and the Enterprise,” again with a focus on topics of interest to businesses: cloud sourcing, business intelligence and advanced data warehousing, IT consumerization in the workplace, key technologies in the digital workplace, and finally business process management (BPM) and the chief process officer, focusing on BPM as a source of corporate agility, innovation, and efficiency.
Chapter 5 tackles disruptive technologies and digitization. The shortest chapter in the book, in 20 pages it covers digital transformation, social innovation labs, and balancing publicity versus privacy in data value. It finishes with a discussion of on-demand communities.
The sixth chapter looks at the future, as the first chapter focused on past developments. In 25 pages, the authors cover the Internet of Things, discuss technology developments in manufacturing and the smart factory, and finish with coverage of, and musings on, future digital society, including implications for work, learning, and customer relationship management.
I am impressed by how the authors are able to tackle such a wide swath of technology development for the novice manager or executive. They struck a good balance between information provided and links to further reading and appropriate examples. Certainly, particular areas could have gone into more detail; for example, information ethics, privacy, and mitigating data breaches are critically important for the corporate manager or executive these days. But on the whole, the authors cover appropriate topics in enough depth to make this a useful work for the nontechnology manager or executive to get caught up with the complex and wide-ranging array of topics within the context of technology and business in 2018. I recommend it.
