Rating: 
Summary: Prof Roger Ellenhurst
Review: 'The Alignment Effect' is a review of issues related to the "business technology disconnect." The highly anecdotal chapters are nicely written and include cameo references from a variety of credible people. Unfortunately, the result is an informal hodgepodge of IT assessments and claims that lead to uncharted waters, which would likely lead to results more pernicious than the problem. There are many books that integrate portfolio management, project management, and IT planning with a dose of knowledge management and collaboration that help accomplish the claimed results without entering the over-simplified world that this book presents. My comments on each major section: Section 1 -- A wordy regurgitation of the fact that IT doesn't always get everything right the first time. This is clearly an attempt to build credibility, but fails to me, since this problem has been well known since the 70s. Section 2 -- A totally informal section, purporting to be "principles," yet failing to deliver any real framework for understanding or action. It doesn't even clarify or regurgitate, I'm not sure where this stuff comes from. I don't sense any deep understanding of IT or its issues. It reads well, but says nothing useful. Section 3 -- This tries to turn the essence of section 2, whatever that could be, into action, apparently to make the book a practical guide. It tries to give an enlightened holistic sounding end-to-end view, and fails, leaving only something more like the cuttings from Pulp Fiction or Memento. The coverage of business models is more like how to organize a simple table of contents and document your business model. The real point is business model documentation, not definition. The book shows know understanding of a "business model" in any sense from marketing through finance. The discussion of process optimization is thin and useless, hundreds of books are available that cover process design and implementation quite well -- skip this section. The conversion of all this into "automation" goes into a toddler-like realm of simplicity, and not in the positive senses that might connote. Section 4 -- On to Governance, another hot buzzword. Loosely speaking, this section tries to build on the earlier sections to talk to modern governance issues. This is the dangerous section. There is nothing to base this section on, the book isn't a new framework or idea, not even a good regurgitation of present knowledge. The governance section does elucidate goals of governance reasonably, but suggests a governance approach that will be as unresponsive to real technology issues as the absolute worst of IT departments might be to business issues. At best, this section would help swing the pendulum the other way, though it would more likely just cut it off. Sadly, the book has good style, presentation, and writing, but lacks useful or coherent content. The few reasonable ideas that appear are endlessly repeated, suggesting the author doesn't believe the reader gets it the first five times. More likely, the author has nothing else to say. The book is timely, but misses the mark. There are many solid books in this arena that are based in workable practices, yet remain high accessible to a broad audience. This book seems highly rushed to me, like the author had an idea and the book came out 30 days later. Somehow the style is good, but the content lacks research or forethought. Professor Roger P. Ellenhurst
California University Coalition
Rating:
Summary: Prof Roger Ellenhurst
Review: 'The Alignment Effect' is a review of issues related to the "business technology disconnect." The highly anecdotal chapters are nicely written and include cameo references from a variety of credible people. Unfortunately, the result is an informal hodgepodge of IT assessments and claims that lead to uncharted waters, which would likely lead to results more pernicious than the problem. There are many books that integrate portfolio management, project management, and IT planning with a dose of knowledge management and collaboration that help accomplish the claimed results without entering the over-simplified world that this book presents. My comments on each major section: Section 1 -- A wordy regurgitation of the fact that IT doesn't always get everything right the first time. This is clearly an attempt to build credibility, but fails to me, since this problem has been well known since the 70s. Section 2 -- A totally informal section, purporting to be "principles," yet failing to deliver any real framework for understanding or action. It doesn't even clarify or regurgitate, I'm not sure where this stuff comes from. I don't sense any deep understanding of IT or its issues. It reads well, but says nothing useful. Section 3 -- This tries to turn the essence of section 2, whatever that could be, into action, apparently to make the book a practical guide. It tries to give an enlightened holistic sounding end-to-end view, and fails, leaving only something more like the cuttings from Pulp Fiction or Memento. The coverage of business models is more like how to organize a simple table of contents and document your business model. The real point is business model documentation, not definition. The book shows know understanding of a "business model" in any sense from marketing through finance. The discussion of process optimization is thin and useless, hundreds of books are available that cover process design and implementation quite well -- skip this section. The conversion of all this into "automation" goes into a toddler-like realm of simplicity, and not in the positive senses that might connote. Section 4 -- On to Governance, another hot buzzword. Loosely speaking, this section tries to build on the earlier sections to talk to modern governance issues. This is the dangerous section. There is nothing to base this section on, the book isn't a new framework or idea, not even a good regurgitation of present knowledge. The governance section does elucidate goals of governance reasonably, but suggests a governance approach that will be as unresponsive to real technology issues as the absolute worst of IT departments might be to business issues. At best, this section would help swing the pendulum the other way, though it would more likely just cut it off. Sadly, the book has good style, presentation, and writing, but lacks useful or coherent content. The few reasonable ideas that appear are endlessly repeated, suggesting the author doesn't believe the reader gets it the first five times. More likely, the author has nothing else to say. The book is timely, but misses the mark. There are many solid books in this arena that are based in workable practices, yet remain high accessible to a broad audience. This book seems highly rushed to me, like the author had an idea and the book came out 30 days later. Somehow the style is good, but the content lacks research or forethought. Professor Roger P. Ellenhurst
California University Coalition
Rating: 
Summary: Quick Read
Review: A quick pass through this book gives you a sense of issues for IT departments. Credibility is down, budgets squeezed, half finished projects. IT is in the dumps these days. I get the feeling Faisal Hoque thinks IT departments area stupd. They should be closely monitored by business leaders at all times. I agree. The book gives you a good sense of issues. It falls short on presenting solutions. It nicely covers IT governance. It is a good intro or refresher for governance and hits the right points for me.
Rating: 
Summary: Mind the Gap. Now Bridge It. Here's How--
Review: Faisal Hoque's The Alignment Effect brings into focus in a particularly helpful way the reasons why companies have failed to reap business value from their technology investments, and uses these reasons to frame and codify a series of steps companies can take to bring business, process and technology issues into alignment to drive business return. In the wake of the new economy crash, IT-business alignment is firmly on the map of companies' strategic concerns. Nonetheless, it's an area that has generated more strategic pronouncements than actionable ideas. The Alignment Effect goes a long way toward correcting that imbalance. The book brings together the practical and the conceptual to characterize the nature and causes of the IT-business disconnect and lay out a game plan for fixing it. This thoroughly worked-out game plan is credible in both the simplicity of its elements (business, process, technology) and the nuanced view it presents of how these elements dynamically interrelate in real-world enterprises. The book's highest-level insights--excerpts from interviews with respected industry veterans--are boxed off, with the effect of framing the more practical points of discussion without pitching them too high. As with all books in the IT-business space, The Alignment Effect is charged with walking the line between business and IT audiences. The book succeeds in this. Indeed, part of its contribution to the problem of IT-business alignment is the production of a common guidebook IT and business audiences can share and through which both audiences can understand how the disconnect looks from the other side of the enterprise. Refreshingly, The Alignment Effect brings to bear a strong feel for the problems real corporations face. Real-world experience populates the compelling frameworks that the book proposes for thinking about and fixing IT-business alignment challenges. Ultimately, the book offers a strong new angle of vision on an old but poorly conceptualized problem--and shows how this vision can be realized, step by step, issue by issue, in today's corporate environment.
Rating: 
Summary: Refreshing Delight
Review: Faisal's book is a very approachable look inside the enterprise. I found the many examples very helpful in understanding challenges of today's IT leaders. The book presents a many-sided view of issues facing IT, without distracting me from key points with depth or details. I was astonished by the breadth of contributors and reviewers. All this support seems too good for any book and drives skeptical people like me to dig deeper. ... The book seems solid, well-written and is enjoyable to read. I look forward to seeing more books from the author.
Rating:
Summary: MIS Ills explored
Review: Hoque gives great information on what troubles IT today. The Alignment Effect is quite fun to read. I think he gave me a sense of the IT situation in most corporations, beyond the few places I've been in my career. If I'd gained a sense of how to fix things, I'd give the book 3 or 4 stars. Unfortunately, I didn't get any sense of how to change things. The lack of suggestions to drive change is a shortcoming and left me empty and feeling partly like I wasted my time. I liked Sarv Devaraj's book on the IT payoff much better. It is dry and harder to read. On the plus side, it gives me an idea of what to measure and change first.
Rating:
Summary: MIS Ills explored
Review: Hoque gives great information on what troubles IT today. The Alignment Effect is quite fun to read. I think he gave me a sense of the IT situation in most corporations, beyond the few places I've been in my career. If I'd gained a sense of how to fix things, I'd give the book 3 or 4 stars. Unfortunately, I didn't get any sense of how to change things. The lack of suggestions to drive change is a shortcoming and left me empty and feeling partly like I wasted my time. I liked Sarv Devaraj's book on the IT payoff much better. It is dry and harder to read. On the plus side, it gives me an idea of what to measure and change first.
Rating:
Summary: Achieving Business-IT Fusion
Review: I have used The Alignment Effect as one of three books for teaching an MBA course: Strategic Management of IT, at the Stuart Graduate School of Business, Illinois Institute of Technology. The content has been an effective means to communicate the challenges, complexities, and benefits
for Business Technology Management [BTM]. This book has an important message. In this network economy, more organizations are transforming into digital enterprises to grow and prosper. The Alignment Effect specifically provides a clear approach to planning and managing the complex mosaic of enterprise strategy, business processes, and technology resources. Most nuggets are easily identifiable as separate guiding principles. Some nuggets, however, are woven into the
normal flow of the text and should be emphasized to the students with less business experience. Overall, the content of this book should resonate well with MBA students. Business strategy formulation, formal modeling, risk assessment, portfolio analysis, investment justification, and designing adaptive organizations represent content from other MBA courses that can be applied to information services management. The structure of the book provides an overview, some detail with examples, and a conclusion for each of the three major sections. A mini-case, used in the three chapters on business models, business processes, and technology automation, provides a
useful means for illustrating the BTM methodology. The content of this book is very readable by all students whether they have an introductory or an advanced knowledge of information systems.
Prior to adopting BTM, a readiness assessment is proposed: Is your organization presently using formal modeling and scenario analyses, promoting collaborative teamwork, and sharing knowledge repositories? If yes, BTM can be successful. If not, the benefits and rationale are documented in the book to persuade your management to become a more collaborative organization. Building upon this readiness assessment, five
challenges for more effective IT management are mapped to BTM activities: business model formulation, business process optimization, technology automation [application, data, network, and platform services], and IT portfolio management. After completing The Alignment Effect, the reader should understand clearly that harvesting business value from IT investments
requires alignment between: (1) business and IT strategies, (2) business and IT performance metrics, (3) business and enterprise architectures, and (4)the attitudes and values of senior business and IT executives.
Rating:
Summary: No help for the weary
Review: I picked up this book after realizing the company is a vendor at our firm.
I liked the forward and introduction. The book hits a nerve in today's enterprise. Everywhere I turn, and every other planning meeting here, the subject of IT alignment shows up.
I read through the major sections to improve my skills. The principles are very mushy and hard to apply. Practical advice is non-existent.
The author abandons software engineering, project planning, and IT management. She presents a strange collection of people-centric approaches and age-old groupware ideas. As if the only issue is not enough meetings and fuzzy stuff. The fuzzy stuff can help, but at the end of the day, business has many really tough challenges. This book offers no short cut and no help.
Rating:
Summary: Bridging Business Value and Technology Solutions
Review: I picked up this book as part of my regular effort to keep on top of industry trends. I had recently attended a META CIO Boot Camp and was interested to read what Dale Kutnick and others were saying about the link between technology and business value. The author presents several scenarios and commentary to illustrate just how his method of decision-making can yield choices that support the business. The book also reaffirms the challenges that we face daily to bridge the gap business leaders and their visions, with the practicality of technology solutions. I found this book very helpful as it took me a step further in thinking about business processes with a view from the top. While I have been successful in communicating that technology choices and implementation first require a disciplined look at business processes, Mr. Hoque's book gave me insight into possible directions available to help make business cases compelling and realistic.
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