We Are Smarter Than Me
How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
Barry Libert & Jon Spector
Wharton School Publishing, 2007

This book is a product of what it preaches – authors Libert & Spector apparently compiled their text with the help of thousands of contributors who chipped in with case studies, examples and the like. The authors dub this process “crowdsourcing” – the act of tapping on the resources of numerous external contributors.

The authors aim to explain how you can successfully leverage the potential of crowdsourcing in your own business.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Harvard Business School Press (March, 2007)

This book makes a compelling case for enhancing a firm’s competitiveness through the systematic use of fact-based analytical decision making techniques.

Nicholas Carr first gained notoriety within the corporate IT world in 2003 with his provocative Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. In the article, Carr argued that companies could no longer gain any strategic advantage from IT investments as its ubiquity had made IT simply another cost of doing business.Carr is now back with another book that is sure to raise the hackles of corporate IT types yet again.

In “The Big Switch“, Carr compares the trend toward grid or cloud computing with the development of the electric grid more than a century ago.Carr agues that much in the same way that stand-alone electric dynamos disappeared with the rise of national power grids, today’s islands of corporate IT resources will be made irrelevant with the shift to utility computing. And as the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centres into the cloud, the traditional IT department is set to go the way of the Dodo.