Jeff Dalton

Over the years, information retrieval and search systems have become more conversational. The last few years have seen a tremendous acceleration of this evolution driven by progress in machine learning. Whereas the possibility of a conversational information seeking (CIS) system robustly understanding conversational input from a person was previously limited, it can now almost be taken for granted. Consumer hardware that supports and encourages conversation is now common, raising awareness of--and the expectation of--conversational support in information retrieval systems. From the research community, this has been accompanied by significant progress in defining more natural CIS tasks, metrics, challenges, and benchmarks. As these developments allowed the field to expand rapidly, this monograph aims to summarise the current state-of-the-art of CIS research, and provide an introduction to new researchers as well as a reference for established researchers in this area. This monograph provides a thorough overview of CIS definitions, applications, interactions, interfaces, design, implementation, and evaluation. The authors view CIS applications as including conversational search, conversational question answering, and conversational recommendation. Their aim is to provide an overview of past research related to CIS, introduce the current state-of-the-art in CIS, highlight the challenges still being faced in the community, and suggest future directions.

Big Agile leaders need an empirical, "high-trust" model that provides guidance for scaling and sustaining agility and capability throughout a modern technology organization. This book presents the Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—a "how-ability" model that provides agile leaders and teams with an operating system to build, evaluate, and sustain great agile habits and behaviors. The APH is an organizational operating system based on a set of interdependent, self-organizing circles, or holons, that reflect the empirical, object-oriented nature of agility. As more companies seek the benefits of Agile within and beyond IT, agile leaders need to build and sustain capability while scaling agility—no easy task—and they need to succeed without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The APH is drawn from lessons learned while observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams. It is not a process or a hierarchy, but a holarchy, a series of performance circles with embedded and interdependent holons that reflect the behaviors of high-performing agile organizations. Great Big Agile provides implementation guidance in the areas of leadership, values, teaming, visioning, governing, building, supporting, and engaging within an all-agile organization. What You’ll Learn Model the behaviors of a high-performance agile organizationBenefit from lessons learned by other organizations that have succeeded with Big AgileAssess your level of agility with the Agile Performance HolarchyApply the APH model to your businessUnderstand the APH performance circles, holons, objectives, and actionsObtain certification for your company, organization, or agency Who This Book Is For Professionals leading, or seeking to lead, an agile organizationwho wish to use an innovative model to raise their organization's agile performance from one level to the next, all the way to mastery