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This book is both a warning and a dramatic
inspiration to business people worldwide. We are in the
early stages of a total revolution in the nature of corporations.
Leaders who understand the revolution are building "cybercorps"
-- corporations which will take full advantage of cyberspace.
It is a bloodless revolution but it will leave in its wake
casualties and mayhem, as well as new types of success stories
and the greatest growth rates in history.
Most of today's corporations are structured
for an age that is gone. But attempts at "Business
Reengineering" have met with more failure than success.
Executives around the world are asking "What comes
next?" -- the new ways of thinking described in this
book. Fluid, fast-learning cybercorps do not need the trauma
of periodic "reengineering" because they are designed
to constantly evolve.
Pragmatic executives have invented deep
structural changes that are necessary for the new era and
improved them, discovering what works well and what does
not. This book assembles the pieces that work best, and
a picture emerges of what future corporations must be like.
This future bears little resemblance to past.
As superhighways and software become ever
more powerful, corporate structures need to be totally reinvented.
Managers everywhere should be replacing obsolete mechanisms
with cybercorp mechanisms. The genie's out of the bottle.
There's no turning back. Cyberspace does not have an off
switch. Society is hurtling into the Cybercorp Revolution
at warp speed, and by the time it has run its course it
will be much larger than the Industrial Revolution. Every
businessperson needs to "think cybercorp."
The dramatic changes described in the book
are inevitable because they enrich the customer and enhance
competitive capability. There is no question about whether
they will occur, and little question about when they
will occur; the questions relate to which corporations will
succeed with them first and which will be knocked out of
business -- which corporations will take the tide at its
flood and which will be swept away with it.
In cybercorp: the new business revolution,
James Martin synthesizes a lifetime of research, experience,
and thinking into the most accessible, hard-hitting, and
visionary book he has ever produced. It's filled with probing,
self-reflective questions that all business leaders need
to ask if they want to survive in the cybercorp world. And
its loaded with real-life examples of organizations around
the world that are designed to succeed.
You'll find out:
- What the Internet and internal computer
networks can do, and how the best companies are using
them today
- How to use cybermarketing to find new
prospects, disseminate information to customers and salespeople,
provide product support, get feedback, and more
- How companies are reinventing themselves
into a collection of value streams that deliver measurable
-- and extremely impressive -- results
- What "virtual" operations are,
and how they are causing business partners to reinvent
their relationships to respond rapidly to fast, fickle
changes in the marketplace
- How small companies are pooling their
resources to create "cybercorp webs" capable
of capturing the business of larger, more sluggish organizations
- How successful companies are turning
the workplace into a learning laboratory that constantly
evolves, experiments -- and achieves breakthrough developments
- How obsolete management thinking can
ruin all the technological strides a company has made
-- a subject most executives are loath to admit
- Why the sledge-hammer approach of reengineering
is detrimental to cybercorp thinking, and what senior
management can do to ensure a successful culture change
James Martin is a Pulitzer Prize nominee.
Cybercorp is his one hundredth text. Many of his
books have been best-sellers in the IT industry, and some
were seminal works that changed perceptions in that industry.
He is one of the world's best-attended
lecturers, and is a foremost authority on the social and
commercial ramifications of computers. James Martin is probably
the only person who is a leading business "guru"
and also a leading technology "guru." He regards
it as his mission to help bridge the gap between top management
and IT.
Martin is Chairman of James Martin &
Co., a worldwide consulting group that builds innovative
corporate IT systems.
He is known as a premier strategist on
management and information technology. He is sometimes referred
to as the "Father of CASE" (Computer Aided Systems
Engineering). His remarkable track record of accurate predictions
about future technology is well known. He was a member of
the software Scientific Advisory Board to the US Department
of Defense. The James Martin Chair of Computing at Oxford
University is concerned with advancing the frontiers of
system development.
In its 25th anniversary issue, Computerworld
ranked Martin fourth among the 25 people who have most influenced
the world of computing.
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