Book Review: Enterprise Architecture Planning

Published almost two decades back, this book provides a prescriptive approach that can be used to create top two layers of John Zachman’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) Framework (as published in year 1987). It provides a ten-phase process, which is phase-wise described in ten chapters. Each of these ten chapters describes the phase by providing steps involved. For each step, the author has mentioned the purpose, deliverables & tasks and guidelines. He has also provided sample documents for business model, data architecture, application architecture and technology architecture, as appendixes. This is a good how-to book for EA and hence every EA professional should consider reading this book.

Book Review: Employees First, Customers Second

Written by CEO of HCL Technologies (HCLT), this book describes a new management philosophy for managing an enterprise in today’s world. The book has got five chapters out of which first four describe four phases of Employees First, Customers Second (EFCS) journey, illustrated with HCLT case. The last chapter answers some of the questions/concerns one would have about the EFCS concept. As its sub-title says, “turning conventional management upside down”, this book provides a contra view of business management, which would make you think if not get convinced. A must-read for every business manager.