Design: A Business Case challenges you to stimulate innovation in your own organization as an ongoing and integral dialogue between complementary skills–to bridge mind and matter, image and identity. Design thinking is a framework developed to ensure C-suite endorsement of the pursuit of design excellence in all actions undertaken by the organization. Design management is a rigorous and strategically anchored mechanism to capitalize on the investment in design as intellectual capital. And design – as we’ve always known it – is the skills, methods and creative capabilities needed to embody ideas and direction. Design thinking inspires, design management enables, design embodies. This book aims to build the bridges needed to reconcile the three, and to encourage organizational and professional environments in which their combined forces can thrive and reverberate.

How do you decide on the best course of action for your company to take advantage of new opportunities? By building a business case. This book provides a framework for building a business case. You'll learn how to: Clearly define the opportunity you'll want to address in your business case Identify and analyze a range of alternatives Recommend one option and assess its risks Create a high-level implementation plan for your proposed alternative Communicate your case to key stakeholders

"Just the understanding and insights you will pick up about how people encounter and cope with combinations of technical, social, political, and economic opportunities and challenges make the book a joy to read and worth much more than the price of it alone." --Barry Boehm, from the Foreword This practical handbook shows you how to build an effective business case when you need to justify--and persuade management to accept--software change or improvement. Based on real-world scenarios, the book covers the most common situations in which business case analyses are required and explains specific techniques that have proved successful in practice. Drawing on years of experience in winning the "battle of the budget," the author shows you how to use commonly accepted engineering economic arguments to make your numbers "sing" to management. The book provides examples of successful business cases; along the way, tables, tools, facts, figures, and metrics guide you through the entire analytic process. Writing in a concise and witty style, the author makes this valuable guidance accessible to every software engineer, manager, and IT professional. Highlights include: How and where business case analyses fit into the software and IT life cycle process Explanations of the most common tools for business case analysis, such as present-value, return-on-investment, break-even, and cost/benefit calculation Tying the business process to the software development life cycle Packaging the business case for management consumption Frameworks and guidelines for justifying IT productivity, quality, and delivery cycle improvement strategies Case studies for applying appropriate decision situations to software process improvement Strategic guidelines for various business case analyses With this book in hand, you will find the facts, examples, hard data, and case studies needed for preparing your own winning business cases in today's complex software environment.

This book contains the extended and revised versions of selected papers from the Third International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2013), held in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, during July 8-10, 2013. The symposium was organized and sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST), in cooperation with the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS), the Center for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), and AMAKOTA Ltd. The theme of BMSD 2013 was "Enterprise Engineering and Software Generation." The 13 full and 20 short papers presented at BMSD 2013 were selected from 56 submissions. The eight papers published in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from the 13 full papers. The selection includes papers touching upon a large number of research topics, ranging from more conceptual ones, such as modeling landscapes, process modeling, declarative business rules, and normalized systems to more practical ones, such as business-case development and performance indicators, and from more business-related topics, such as value modeling and service systems, to topics related to information architectures.

Judging by all the hoopla surrounding business plans, you'd think the only things standing between would-be entrepreneurs and spectacular success are glossy five-color charts, bundles of meticulous-looking spreadsheets, and decades of month-by-month financial projections. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, often the more elaborately crafted a business plan, the more likely the venture is to flop. Why? Most plans waste too much ink on numbers and devote too little to information that really matters to investors. The result? Investors discount them. In How to Write a Great Business Plan, William A. Sahlman shows how to avoid this all-too-common mistake by ensuring that your plan assesses the factors critical to every new venture: The people—the individuals launching and leading the venture and outside parties providing key services or important resources The opportunity—what the business will sell and to whom, and whether the venture can grow and how fast The context—the regulatory environment, interest rates, demographic trends, and other forces shaping the venture's fate Risk and reward—what can go wrong and right, and how the entrepreneurial team will respond Timely in this age of innovation, How to Write a Great Business Plan helps you give your new venture the best possible chances for success.