It is always a pleasure to read a well written book in a leading edge arena and that's exactly what this book provides. With the potential for myself to be involved with Test and Evaluation (T&E) in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) I was looking for a book that captured the latest thinking for Enterprise Architecture (EA) and had the vision of what the future held in this fast paced area of business. Chorafas, one of the most prolific writers and orchestrators of future thought, provides numerous real world examples to document the complex integration problems and a response to evolutionary trends. Being on Temporary Duty (TDY) in the Austin, TX area it was somewhat serendipity to see a front page story in the local newspaper about Dell Computers vision of the future. Dell uses EA extensively. Any senior decision-maker in private industry or government that's not familiar with most of the concepts captured in this book is doing a disservice to himself and the organization he/she leads. Nanotechnology, optics, and biological frontiers are all covered with the latest information and then linked to the most advanced applications, tools and methods available to maximize return on investment (ROI) for as Chorafas notes several times..."cost matters". One of the highlights is the numerous graphs and models to capture complex thoughts with relative simplicity.

A better title could have been "Reliable accounting for risk, its financial reporting and internal control". It is written against a background of major banking blunders due to their failure to properly account for, report and control risk. This makes the comparision of different accounting standards between countries easier to understand with a discussion of the historical context. (usually the comparison of standards is dead boring - in this book it is not). One of the good things about this book is that it goes beyond the current accounting standards and internal control methods to suggest ways to improve them. It has a very practical approach to issues relating to accounting for risk. Its discussions are deep without being too complex.

"Good" is the best word to describ this book. If you want to do a research on Transaction Management over Distributed Database, read this book first.

firs of all i would pay to thank to the author of the book and then i would say that i am really impressed by the mind of the author any person can get knowldege from the endeavor of the author

Chorafas book is tedious to read. The titles are excellent, but the majority of the time I found the content under the title poorly researched, off the subject or focused only on one insignificant point instead of the subject title.

This book is difficult to classify other than it ties together a number of related, but different, disciplines. It is also one of the most interesting books on ERP, CRM and SCM I have ever read because of the eclectic array of topics and fascinating points of view.

Chapters I liked based on professional interest are: Auditing the Implementation, Operation and Maintenance of ERP Software, The Ongoing Change in the Practice of Auditing Information Technology, Auditing Supply Chain Solutions and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, Case Studies in Auditing a Company's Financial Statements and Other Reports, Auditing the Security/Protection Methodology and Providing Improvements. These are solidly written and thoroughly cover all aspects of the topics. This is no surprise if you are familiar with Mr. Chorafas' work, which is heavily slanted towards financial management.

I also liked "The Next Frontier in Technology and in Supply Chain Management", which is one of the more visionary chapters in the book. It also has one of the longest titles I have ever seen (I truncated the complete title name). Unfortunately, like the title, well crafted sentences are not a hallmark of Mr. Chorafas' writing. Despite that, the information he provides between the covers of this book is thought-provoking and excellent fodder for long-range strategic planning.

If you are an architect, strategic planner of CIO of a company that employs or plans to employ any two or the three foundation systems discussed in this book (ERP, CRM or SCM) this book is essential reading. It is also an excellent resource for consultants who specialize in any of the three system types.

Good summary of the new BIS rules, but the review of understanding marking-to-model is sketchy, inconsistent, and rife with too many pseudo-graphs and footnotes to his own books and articles.

I don't like this book. It explains elementary things about agents, in totaly non-scientific way.

Very blah-blah style of writing.

This book gives a good insight of the agent domain and also about the ongoing intresting project in MIT regarding Intelligent Agents. This book also gives a good overview of KQML. This book is very good if U want to know about the intelligent agent technology without going to any specific language implementation details.

A much better title for this book would have been "Interesting Financial Concepts That Hopefully Some Other Book Will Teach You"

As an engineer, I saw this as a very shallow treatment of Chaos Theory that will do NOTHING for those who actually wish to apply it to financial markets. Chapter after chapter poses questions to the reader but fails do deliver the answers. One can only assume that the few diagrams and examples presented are not explained because the author just does not fully understand them.

The reviewer who claims that the book was a good starting point may have been partially right. It asks so many questions that now I must find a text with at least one or two answers.

Although math is mentioned in the desciption, you won't find any in this book. This book is written for junior high school economics students who have never heard the terms chaos or fuzzy logic before. With a background in non-linear dynamics, I found this text insulting for its price. Application of the current trendy concepts to any market whatsoever was completely lacking. It is essentially a 300+ page version of Webster's dictionary definition of chaos. For the amount of information present in this book, it should be priced in the five to ten dollar range.

Something of a disappointment. There is almost nothing of a truly technical nature. A lot of chalk board drawings but nothing you can feed to a computer to test any ideas. It would have been worth the price if it had included a few real world models, perhaps implemented as spreadsheets. Otherwise, it's just a b-r-o-a-d overview.