Publications

Shift from application-centric to data-centric to enable your organization to develop more efficient and successful Enterprise Information Systems.

“Even if the thought of data modeling makes you cringe, Dave McComb’s latest book makes the case that it is a necessary exercise for the data-driven organization. The ‘Data-Centric Revolution’ shows how to be data-driven in an extensible, flexible way that is baked-into organizational culture, rather than taking a typical project-by-project approach. The book is a fun, insightful and meaty read, well-illustrated, and with endless wonderful examples.”
Doug Laney, Principal, Data & Analytics Strategy, Caserta, and author of the best-seller, “Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information for Competitive Advantage”

This is the book your Systems Integrator and your Application Software vendor don't want you to read. Enterprise IT (Information Technology) is a $3.8 trillion per year industry worldwide. Most of it is waste. We've grown used to projects costing tens of millions or even billions of dollars, and routinely running over budget and schedule many times over. These overages in both time and money are almost all wasted resources. However, the waste is hard to see, after being so marbled through all the products, processes, and guiding principles. That is what this book is about. We must see, understand, and agree about the problem before we can take coordinated action to address it.

Author and technology consultant Dave McComb on how to curb runaway IT spending.

Semantics in Business Systems begins with a description of what semantics are and how they affect business systems. It examines four main aspects of the application of semantics to systems, specifically: How do we infer meaning from unstructured information, how do application systems make meaning as they operate, how do practitioners uncover meaning in business settings, and how do we understand and communicate what we have deduced? This book illustrates how this applies to the future of application system development, especially how it informs and affects Web services and business rule- based approaches, and how semantics will play out with XML and the semantic Web. The book also contains a quick reference guide to related terms and technologies. It is part of Morgan Kaufmann's series of Savvy Manager's Guides.

After a slow incubation period of nearly 15 years, a large and growing number of organizations now have one or more projects using the Semantic Web stack of technologies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is an essential ingredient in this stack, and the need for ontologists is increasing faster than the number and variety of available resources for learning OWL. This is especially true for the primary target audience for this book: modelers who want to build OWL ontologies for practical use in enterprise and government settings. The purpose of this book is to speed up the process of learning and mastering OWL. To that end, the focus is on the 30% of OWL that gets used 90% of the time.