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Book Description

Making Data Integration Work: How to Systematically Reduce Cost, Improve Quality, and Enhance Effectiveness

Today’s enterprises are investing massive resources in data integration. Many possess thousands of point-to-point data integration applications that are costly, undocumented, and difficult to maintain. Data integration now accounts for a major part of the expense and risk of typical data warehousing and business intelligence projects–and, as businesses increasingly rely on analytics, the need for a blueprint for data integration is increasing now more than ever.

This book presents the solution: a clear, consistent approach to defining, designing, and building data integration components to reduce cost, simplify management, enhance quality, and improve effectiveness. Leading IBM data management expert Tony Giordano brings together best practices for architecture, design, and methodology, and shows how to do the disciplined work of getting data integration right.

Mr. Giordano begins with an overview of the “patterns” of data integration, showing how to build blueprints that smoothly handle both operational and analytic data integration. Next, he walks through the entire project lifecycle, explaining each phase, activity, task, and deliverable through a complete case study. Download Now »

Book Description

Building and managing a professional service firm is very different from running a product-based business. Infrastructure, governance, talent acquisition and retention, and compensation and financial management vary significantly from traditional corporate environments. Conventional management advice doesn’t offer all the answers, and mainstream business gurus rarely address the unique challenges facing professional service firm leaders.

The Art of Managing Professional Services is one of the most comprehensive, research-based guides to firm management ever written for
the industry. Based on more than 130 in-depth interviews with leaders of the world’s top firms, the book offers practical, proven, best practices on how to tackle the ten critical areas that firm leaders must monitor to build and maintain a strong organization: vision, values, and culture; people; clients; services; finance; positioning; partnership; strategy; structure; and leadership style.

Maureen Broderick draws on her 30 years of experience in professional services to explore both the art and science of running a high performance firm. She presents tangible processes and programs—including 40 featured best practices—that readers can tailor to their own organizations and cultures. Inside you will learn:

• How to create and maintain a shared vision, values, and culture
• Best programs to recruit, train, and retain great people Download Now »

Book Description

If you’re a website designer, intranet manager or someone without much Information Architecture experience, this book answers all those questions you were afraid to ask.

Drawing on her many years experience of practising and teaching Information Architecture, Donna Spencer guides you through some simple steps to better IA and leaves you feeling empowered and able to run your own IA projects. Whether it’s organising content, providing clear descriptions or ways for people to get to them, this book is armed with practical advice and examples.

Who should read this book?
If you need to know how to structure content on a website, then you need to know some basics of how to design an IA. So, that includes people like Project Managers, Copywriters, Developers, Designers, eMarketing people, Product Owners, Web App owners and editorial assistants.

Topics include:
Part 1 : About information architecture
What is information architecture? Who does it? and what do they do? What does IA look like in a project? All these questions will be answered in Part One. Download Now »

Book Description

In recent years, the terms Visualization, Infographic and others have been bantered around with almost no regard to their use or meaning. There is a new vernacular emerging in the realms of data representations, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the much simpler origins and best practices of charts and graphs.

Brian Suda takes you on a journey through the basics and makes it easy to produce beautiful looking, accurate representations of data. He’ll walk you through how to visualize and design data in such a way that it engages the reader and tells a story rather than just being flashy, cluttered and confusing.

Who should read this book?
If you’ve ever been asked to produce a chart or graph, you should read this book. If you’re a researcher, designer, developer, UX designer, IA, product owner or web app owner you can get a lot out of this book and take your visualisations to the next level.

To put it in the real world, you could use this book for:

• Designing web app dashboards
• Presenting research
• Visualising user activity in your web app or service Download Now »

Book Description

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why settle for anything less? Creating good visualizations to substantiate your ideas is essential in today’s corporate environment. Use OmniGraffle’s remarkably powerful and flexible features to get your diagrams right. Although fun to use, it can get cumbersome to find out exactly how to get what you want.

This book will teach you how to make stunning diagrams without spending much time and energy. No matter if you have never used OmniGraffle, or if you are using it on a daily basis, this book will teach you how to get the most out of this splendid diagramming tool. It will first teach you the basics of the program and then extend your knowledge to a higher level.

The book will teach you to make eye-popping visuals using a lot of useful, step-by-step examples. It begins with covering concepts that beef up your basics of using OmniGraffle. The earlier chapters will teach you to prepare dazzling diagrams from scratch with the many stencils, shapes, and fonts that are included in OmniGraffle. As your understanding of OmniGraffle broadens, the book will go even deeper to explain the less understood features of the software. It also covers some handy time-saving techniques such as workspaces and keyboard shortcuts.

By the time you reach the end of this book, you will have mastered OmniGraffle to turn your ideas into diagrams.

The only book to teach you everything about the best diagramming software for the Macintosh Download Now »

Book Description

Business planning is no longer just about defining goals, analyzing critical issues, and then creating strategies. You must aid business integration by linking changed-data events in DB2 databases on Linux, UNIX, and Windows with EAI solutions , message brokers, data transformation tools, and more. Investing in this book will save you many hours of work (and heartache) as it guides you around the many potential pitfalls to a successful conclusion.

This book will accompany you throughout your Q replication journey. Compiled from many of author’s successful projects, the book will bring you some of the best practices to implement your project smoothly and within time scales. The book has in-depth coverage of Event Publisher, which publishes changed-data events that can run updated data into crucial applications, assisting your business integration processes. Event Publisher also eliminates the hand coding typically required to detect DB2 data changes that are made by operational applications.

We start with a brief discussion on what replication is and the Q replication release currently available in the market. We then go on to explore the world of Q replication in more depth. The latter chapters cover all the Q replication components and then talk about the different layers that need to be implemented-the DB2 database layer, the WebSphere MQ layer, and the Q replication layer. We conclude with a chapter on how to troubleshoot a problem. The Appendix (available online) demonstrates the implementation of 13 real-time Q replication scenarios with step-by-step instructions. Download Now »