This book examines issues related to the alignment of business strategies and analytics. Vast amounts of data are being generated, collected, stored, processed, analyzed, distributed and used at an ever-increasing rate by organizations. Simultaneously, managers must rapidly and thoroughly understand the factors driving their business. Business Analytics is an interactive process of analyzing and exploring enterprise data to find valuable insights that can be exploited for competitive advantage. However, to gain this advantage, organizations need to create a sophisticated analytical climate within which strategic decisions are made. As a result, there is a growing awareness that alignment among business strategies, business structures, and analytics are critical to effectively develop and deploy techniques to enhance an organization’s decision-making capability. In the past, the relevance and usefulness of academic research in the area of alignment is often questioned by practitioners, but this book seeks to bridge this gap. Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics: Bridging Between Theory and Practice is comprised of twelve chapters, divided into three sections. The book begins by introducing business analytics and the current gap between academic training and the needs within the business community. Chapters 2 - 5 examines how the use of cognitive computing improves financial advice, how technology is accelerating the growth of the financial advising industry, explores the application of advanced analytics to various facets of the industry and provides the context for analytics in practice. Chapters 6 - 9 offers real-world examples of how project management professionals tackle big-data challenges, explores the application of agile methodologies, discusses the operational benefits that can be gained by implementing real-time, and a case study on human capital analytics. Chapters 10 - 11 reviews the opportunities and potential shortfall and highlights how new media marketing and analytics fostered new insights. Finally the book concludes with a look at how data and analytics are playing a revolutionary role in strategy development in the chemical industry.

In order to establish and maintain a successful company in the digital age, managers are digitally transforming their organizations to include such tools as disruptive technologies and digital data to improve performance and efficiencies. As these companies continue to adopt digital technologies to improve their businesses and create new revenues and value-producing opportunities, they must also be aware of the challenges digitalization can present. Business Transformations in the Era of Digitalization is a collection of innovative research on the latest trends, business opportunities, and challenges in the digitalization of businesses. Highlighting a range of topics including business-IT alignment, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), business sustainability, small and medium-sized enterprises, and digital entrepreneurship, this book is ideally designed for managers, professionals, consultants, entrepreneurs, and researchers.

What difference can the aspiring HR strategist really make to business value? In the new edition of her ground-breaking book, Linda Holbeche answers this question and provides the tools and insights to help HR managers and directors add value to the organization by implementing effective HR initiatives that are aligned to core business strategies. Featuring updated profiles and case studies from top HR strategists who have used their skills to deliver a variety of key business objectives, Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy, 2nd edition provides inspiration and guidance on how to apply the theory to challenges in your organization. Learn how you can strengthen and prove the relationship between people strategy and business success through your approach to performance and development and impress at the highest levels with this new edition of an HR classic. Linda Holbeche is Director of Research and Policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Linda chairs and speaks at meetings and conferences worldwide and appeared at number six in Human Resources magazine's HR most influential 2008 roll call of top industry thinkers.

The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table. Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful. Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader.

Defining business alignment as the process of “ensuring that a new project, program, or process is connected directly to business impact measures, usually expressed in terms such as output, quality, cost, or time,” 10 Steps to Successful Business Alignment offers concrete input, detailed suggestions, and pragmatic know-how on how to plan for, implement, and maintain effective alignment for projects of nearly every size and scope. Written by a pair of renowned experts in the field of business measurement and evaluation, 10 Steps to Successful Business Alignment shows how to connect projects to business measures, and how to maintain alignment with those measures throughout a project’s entire life cycle. This book covers the full spectrum of issues related to alignment, including planning the alignment with clients; determining payoff, business, performance, and preference needs; addressing high-level objectives; measuring impact; reporting the results of the alignment; and more. In providing both a conceptual framework as well as nuts-and-bolts information on how to achieve meaningful, effective alignment, some of the topics on which this volume drills down into useful specifics include: how and when to discuss alignment with clients which projects are (and which projects aren’t) appropriate for applying alignment the proper ways to clarify and manage expectations of the alignment process best practices for addressing the needs of a project and the related alignment program a discussion of the factors that contribute to the success of alignment how to achieve buy-in on alignment from stakeholders in a project a detailed, highly objective review of how to measure the impact of alignment why isolating the impact of alignment process is crucial the most effective ways to report and communicate your results. Truly a comprehensive resource on alignment, 10 Steps to Successful Business Alignment delivers practical insight on every step of the alignment process, and is essential reading for every professional involved in creating, maintaining, and verifying alignment.

Organization of data warehouses are vital but often ignored aspects of growing enterprises. This work merges technological know-how with managerial practices to show both the business manager and the IT professional how better alignment between data warehouse plans and business strategies can lead to a successful data warehouse adoption that will support the entire infrastructure. More complete than any other text in the field, this resource also addresses the managerial and strategic aspects of data warehouses, offering doable solutions that will allow for the strategic alignment of these warehouses while building them and ensuring that this alignment is sustained.

Most companies waste billions of dollars on technology. Don't be one of them. If you need the best practices and ideas for unleashing technology's strategic potential--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are eight inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place. This collection of HBR articles will help you: - Clarify corporate strategy with your IT department - Fund only IT projects that support your strategy - Transform IT investments into profits - Build one technology platform for your entire organization - Adopt new technologies only when their best practices are established - Use analytics to make smart decisions at all levels of your company - Integrate social media into your business