Creating Business Agility: How Convergence of Cloud, Social, Mobile, Video, and Big Data Enables Competitive Advantage

Creating Business Agility: How Convergence of Cloud, Social, Mobile, Video, and Big Data Enables Competitive Advantage provides a game plan for integrating technology to build a smarter, more customer-centric business. Using a series of case studies as examples throughout, the book describes the agility that comes from collaborative commerce, and provides key decision makers the implementation roadmap they need to build a successful business ecosystem. The focus is on Business Agility Readiness in terms of the five major changes affecting the information technology landscape, and how data-driven delivery platforms and decision-making processes are being reinvented using digital relationships with a social business model as the consumer world of technology drives innovation and collaboration.

Cloud computing, social media, next-gen mobility, streaming video, and big data with predictive analytics are major forces now for a competitive advantage, and Creating Business Agility provides leaders with a roadmap for readiness. Business leaders tasked with innovation and strategy will find that Creating Business Agility provides important insight from an informed perspective.

About the Authors

Alakh Verma is Director of Product Development (Platform Technology Solutions) at Oracle USA, headquarters at Redwood Shores, CA, USA. He has over 20 years of experience in the high technology industry blended with academia. Verma spearheads and evangelizes emerging-technologies-based solutions and services among global partner ecosystem and envisions major shifts in IT trends with cloud, social, mobile, big data, and predictive analytics.

Verma is engaged in Product Management of technology platforms (cloud, social, mobile, big data, and predictive analytics) at Oracle, and has traveled all across the U.S., Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Europe, Middle East, and African countries as a business and technology delegate in global forums and symposiums.

He is currently engaged in managing a wide range of technical and business responsibilities, including product management, marketing, evangelism, technical enablement, and global alliances and channel management.

He is distinguished speaker, author, and mentor in the area of business and technology. He has published several papers in journals and regularly writes blogs on the emerging technologies.

Verma is a postgraduate in management from Jamnalal Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS) in Mumbai, India, and has a Master of Science in Systems Management from Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU) in Belmont, California. He is an adjunct faculty and advisor at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Santa Cruz–Silicon Valley Extension, and offers lectures and thought leadership in the field of Cloud and Big Data.

Rodney Heisterberg serves as Professor in the School of Business and Management at Notre Dame de Namur University. He teaches courses on the application of information technology (IT) for enabling strategic management decision making in virtual enterprises for the Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Systems Management degree programs. He applies the learnings of those principles and practices as Managing Partner of Rod Heisterberg Associates for clients who are IT users and vendors.

Dr. Heisterberg has over 25 years of experience in the field of IT. He holds BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, studying industrial engineering, computer science, and business administration. He has worked and consulted for numerous Global 500 companies, including British Aerospace, Eli Lilly, Ford, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Procter & Gamble, Sunbeam, South African Breweries, and US Steel, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense at the Pentagon. Career highlights include serving as Program Director for a personal computer industry initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of State to establish a PC manufacturing industrial base for economic development of the government of Iraq.

He was Director of Information Technology Management Consulting for Gartner in San Jose, where he performed technology product forecasting and led engagements for eBusiness transformation strategy and applications architecture development. His responsibilities focused on strategic planning for collaborative commerce, including formation, implementation, and operation of businesses as virtual enterprises.