The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools
by Ted Goranson
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What People are Saying
Bravo! This highly insightful, highly thoughtful book is the first to offer useful advice on creating the agile enterprise. Goranson pulls no punches when he puts misconceptions about enterprise agility, lean manufacturing, virtual operating practices, relationship contracts and trust, and activity based costing and management firmly in their place. Focused on the virtual enterprise as an interaction of resources and competencies, Goranson offers models and metrics for thriving in a business environment of unexpected change. Chock full of lucid, high impact stories, this is a must-read for anyone involved with organizational architecture, supply chain strategy, cooperative ventures of any kind, and especially defense industry procurement issues. Based on solid research and analysis of successful agile virtual enterprises, this is at once an easy read, a deep exposure, and a worthy reference.
---Rick Dove, Chairman, Paradigm Shift International, Coauthor of Twenty First Century Manufacturing Enterprise.
As someone who has probably read all the published books that use the word agile or agility in their titles, this is the only one that I found to be about something genuinely new and different. It is stimulating, interesting, enjoyable and informative. Anyone who wants to understand how agility as a concept goes beyond lean enterprise should read this book.
---Paul T. Kidd, Author of Agile Manufacturing: Forging New Frontiers.
The author, Ted Goranson, brings clarity to an important topic for today's business leaders. The concept of the "Agile Virtual Enterprise" enables business leaders to be prepared for the unexpected change and, working with other companies in a virtual fashion, respond effectively to the opportunities. The book brings clarity to the business concept with many examples that further explain a key direction for improving competitiveness.
---John D. Oleson, Director of Manufacturing Technology, Dow Corning, Author of, Pathways to Agility--Mass Customization in Action.
Ted Goranson does a great job in giving the reader strong pictures and cases about Agility first. But he does not simply stay with some (war-)story telling. Instead he ventures to develop general concepts and models with scientific rigour.
Linking his models to existing mainstream theories and some innovative developments allows him to show, what agility is - and what it is not.
And it allows him to trace the consequences of becoming agile into such distinct management functions as corporate finance, human resource management, manufacturing and innovation or information systems.
A book invaluable for all, who plan to apply the concept of agility and even more for those who develop methods, tools and system to support agile enterprises.
---Privatdozent Dr.-Ing. Dipl-Kfm. Bernhard R. Katzy, Uni BW Munich (author of chapter on Virtual Organizations in Handbook of Life Cycle Engineering).
"The Agile Virtual Enterprise" by H.T. Goranson is an excellent book for researchers and business people alike. It should be required reading for all those interested in how to thrive, not just survive in the business world of the 21st century. There are real examples which bring the theory to life along with practical tools previously unavailable. Goranson is a gifted raconteur making a complex topic reasonably easy to comprehend.
---Jamie Rogers, PhD, PE, Associate Professor, University of Texas-Arlington and Technical Lead - Enterprise Engineering Group at the UTA Automation and Robotics Research Institute.
This book offers an impressive review and explanation of agility and virtualness, describing through the examples how these both concepts influenced our past, present and future. I am personally using it as a reference for establishing in Brazil a Virtual Organization as well as for my under and post-graduation courses. I highly recommend this book for people who really intend and need a strong basis for working with agility and virtualness. Congratulations for Ted Goranson for this excellent work.
—Carlos Bremer, Professor, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, Brazil
The Agile Virtual Enterprise is the primer for agile virtual enterprises! H.T. Goranson has captured all the available knowledge on AVEs and presented it with clarity and detail. To be successful in our global environment requires businesses to operate as AVEs. This book must be read by every person that helps business enterprises make decisions for success!
—Jerry Rosser, Hughes Missile Systems (retired) and Co-Facilitator of the the Agile Virtual Enterprise Focus Group
Author's Comment
This book is ambitious. We always work in areas that leverage very esoteric theories and address hard problems. But in this project, we spent years working in a space where everything needs to be understandable and auditable at a non-technical level. So the challenge was to be novel and formal in a very challenging space, but to do so in way that everyone "gets it" and understands why.
This book leans heavily on some remarkable stories and case studies. The first part of the book is captivating we are told, and tells stories we guarantee haven't been presented before. Substantial work went into ferreting out this information, and we are thankful to DARPA for sponsoring this.
A middle section provides consultant-like analytical tools to address general management tools for the newly important application of agile virtual enterprises. The final section provides a few of the most challenging tools, based on that foundation.
We worked to present many new ideas in a coherent framework. And we wanted to deliver some new tools and methods in such a way that they can be used straight out-of-the-book.
Table of Contents/Index
Click here to view an annotated contents
Other Book Material by Goranson
Goranson was sponsor of the International Conference on Enterprise Integration Modeling Technology (ICEIMT) and principle investigator of the Suppliers' Working Group which was the primary research activity leading up to those workshops. The ten chapters in Enterprise Integration Modeling, edited by Charles Petrie, MIT Press, 1992 report on this work (still a key reference).
That work was updated with a series of workshops and conference five years later. Goranson wrote four chapters concerning new insights (which were significant) in Enterprise Engineering and Integration, edited by Kurt Kosanke and J. Nell, Springer, 1997.
Goranson was on the advisory board of and has a chapter on "Architectural Requirements of Commercial Products" in the International Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems, edited by P. Bernus, K. Mertins and G. Schmidt, Springer, 1998. Therein he extends one specific idea in the AVE book having to do with commercial support for introspective modeling.
The results of applying the tool (incidentally decribed on this site) to the problems noted in the chapter above were a part of the National Research Council's study on Visionary Manufacturing Challenges for 2020, National Academy Press, 1999 and are outlined in an appendix therein.
He has a chapter on Agile Manufacturing in the Handbook of Life Cycle Engineering: Concepts, Tools and Techniques, edited by A. Molina, J.M. Sánchez and A. Kusiak, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999
The work on future architectures in the AVE book is result of Goranson's extended effort as a panel member for the forthcoming Integrated Manufacturing Technology Roadmap, drafts of which can be found here.
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