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The Art of Business Value

By Mark Schwartz

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Foreword by Gene Kim

Playful and thought-provoking, The Art of Business Value explores what business value means, why it matters, and how it should affect your software development and delivery practices. More than any other IT delivery approach, DevOps (and Agile thinking in general) makes business value a central concern. This book examines the role of business value in software and makes a compelling case for why a clear understanding of business value will change the way you deliver software.

  • Publication Date April 7, 2016
  • Pages 160
  • Paperback Dimensions 6 x 9 inches, black and white
  • Paperback ISBN 9781942788041
  • eBook ISBN 9781942788058
  • Kindle ISBN 9781942788065
  • Audiobook ISBN 9781942788485

Features

  • Thought Provoking

    Explore and deconstruct overloaded and misunderstood business language around “value,” and discover new ways to define and integrate value into your company.

  • Improved Outcomes

    Understand how to collectively define and effectively deliver business value.

  • Essential Guide

    Follow the deeply researched ways to consider Agile and DevOps practices through the lens of a value pipeline.

  • All Levels

    From practitioners just starting out to veteran technology leaders, this book is a must-read resource for understanding business value.

About the Book

Do you really understand what business value is? Information technology can and should deliver business value. But the Agile literature has paid scant attention to what business value means—and how to know whether or not you are delivering it. This problem becomes ever more critical as you push value delivery toward autonomous teams and away from requirements “tossed over the wall” by business stakeholders. An empowered team needs to understand its goal!

Playful and thought-provoking, The Art of Business Value explores what business value means, why it matters, and how it should affect your software development and delivery practices. More than any other IT delivery approach, DevOps (and Agile thinking in general) makes business value a central concern.

This book examines the role of business value in software and makes a compelling case for why a clear understanding of business value will change the way you deliver software.

This book will make you think deeply about not only what it means to deliver value but also the relationship of the IT organization to the rest of the enterprise. It will give you the language to discuss value with the business, methods to cut through bureaucracy, and strategies for incorporating Agile teams and culture into the enterprise. Most of all, this book will startle you into new ways of thinking about the cutting-edge of Agile practice and where it may lead.

Mark Schwartz
Mark Schwartz

Mark Schwartz

Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his CIO experience to bring strategies to enterprises or enterprises to strategies, and bring both to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile processes in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or else he just thinks about it a lot.

To Author Archive

"A well-written, lucid, and thorough inquiry . . . that will prove invaluable to every organization working in the Lean/Agile paradigm."

Jez Humble

coauthor of The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate

"This is a mind-expanding experience for all of us who strive to provide real value in the solutions that we deliver."

Carmen DeArdo

Tasktop

"This entertaining and deeply researched book is an essential guide for businesses that are evolving to adopt Agile and DevOps practices ..."

Adrian Cockcroft

formerly of Amazon

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