Books by John Alexander

The big story of Scotland's brewing history in a little book!

Mrs. Mouse shares her home with homeless mice for Christmas.

Beginning in the old book store and mounting in tension to the end in the child's room in the wee hours of the morning, the love of words, ideas, and sharing what's inside come alive through the intrigue of this 498-word tale, Words That Soar. A child wants to find an interesting read, but a book presented by an old bookstore owner brings more than expected late that night. The child remembers three special rules from the bookstore owner to make sense of what's encountered upon opening the book and experiencing the powerful impact of words.

This book will demystify Enterprise Architecture (EA), demonstrate its usefulness, and empower you to make EA an integral part of your organization's business management and forward planning.An organization is like a living organism. The architecture of an organism's internal structures must allow that organism to thrive within the environment in which it is operating. These "internal structures" within an organism might be organs or tissues; in an organization, though, they are the "information systems".As an organism's environment changes, its internal systems and structures must adapt. We will use this analogy as a starting point to discuss the "why" and "what" questions of enterprise architecture for information systems in organizations. To begin this process, we must switch from the traditional EA approach of looking only at internal factors, to a new, holistic view that considers the external environment. In other words, while most EA discussions are "inside-out," in this book, we will attempt to go "outside-in."Capturing the Organization Organism: Outlines a structure for organizations which is common to all organizations, regardless of the enterprise that they are involved with. Uses data subject areas from one part of enterprise architecture, the enterprise data model artifact, to describe what is internal and what is external to the organization. Provides connections between what is external and what is internal. This means describing how change is transmitted from external to internal environments, and how that change affects the architecture. Defines the enterprise architecture of business functions and business application systems that, at a broad level, are common to all organizations. Explores how common business application systems for organizations need to be different due to the different business environments in which they operate. Explains the integration requirements across an organization's business application systems, and how to address these requirements with a disparate COTS-based portfolio, while also exploring the Artificial Intelligence (AI) possibilities of an integrated environment. Reveals six key questions to help get started in understanding the organization and its operating environment.

This outstanding thesis provides a wide-ranging overview of the growth of titanium dioxide thin films and its use in photo-electrochemicals such as water splitting.