Managing Information Technology for Business Value: Practical Strategies for IT and Business Managers (IT Best Practices series)

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Summary: Invaluable for those involved in IT decision-making
Review: If you want to ensure that sound economic sense prevails over organisational politics when it comes to making IT decisions, then this book is an invaluable resource and immediately useful.

It provides a useful mix of what should be done with how it should be done. The presentation of ideas and approaches via maturity frameworks is helpful as it allows you to easily identify how effective your IT function really is and where it needs to be. Overall, it's clearly written and well presented.

This book provides an excellent roadmap to enable the IT function to increase its business value to your organisation in a more meaningful and purposeful manner.

Rating:
Summary: Solid outline of the requirements for systemised IT mgt.
Review: Imagine you manage a utility, your customers expect your service anytime they want it, anywhere they happen to be, and at a low price. So far it's a pretty complex job, now imagine that your utility is subject to almost continuous innovation, with substantial changes happening every three to five years, and industry-transforming changes occurring approximately once a decade. Your customers expect all the new stuff, anytime, everywhere and cheaper than before. And, if that's not enough, your suppliers emit enough hype to make Hollywood blush, every new release is a blockbuster and a must-have.
Such is the life of the IT manager, or in larger organisations the CIO, Chief Information Officer - which, as the author suggests, could also translate as 'Career Is Over'. This book provides a framework for harassed IT executives to attempt to an organisational self-assessment , and outlines a methodology of getting closer to the customer. The framework is based on the Capability Maturity Model - a familiar concept originally designed to inculcate Quality Systems into software design- and builds a case for describing the evolution of IT departments from chaos through technical service provide to business partner. The methodology can be summarized as aligning IT products and services with customer requirements, and highlighting the costs of IT products and services i.e. being more explicit about 'pay-per-use' costings, so customers will budget as well as demand. There are good real-world examples of decisions taken, business cases ratified and changes justified and implemented through the book.

The target reader is one who is part of a large IT organisation within an even larger corporate organisation, and is based on the author's experience in Intel, whose IT department has 4,000 people and a budget of €1billion [page 228]. In this world one department can become remote from another, and basic business processes need to be continuously clarified and communicated. The author recommends the use of account mangers and IT marketing departments to break through communications barriers - within the same company!. It did occur to me that, somewhere in this need for internal corporate influencing, there is a Dilbert cartoon waiting to get out.
The book is strong on the methodology of governance of an IT function from the basics - do you have a list of IT assets? - through to investing in new innovations using an options approach - in fact, read Chapter 8 first. It occurs to me that the structural processes described in terms of steering committees, assessment methodologies, internal customer communication, external benchmarking militate against the ideal of developing a management which is flexible, innovative and agile. I guess this is the challenge - obviously some rationale is necessary, some structure required to manage a large organisation and this structure obviously works for this organisation. It does bring to mind Clayton's Christensen's dilemma that even excellent organisations, can be misdirected by following their customers requirements and while focussed on continuous innovation can miss an industry transforming wave. There is obviously a tension between becoming more customer focused in terms of service provision and the requirement to being agile and receptive to transformational innovations.
A few quibbles.... One of the main tenets of the book is that IT departments must earn the trust of their business customers. There is curiously little said about techniques for managing quality of service issues, particularly for mission-critical applications. I expect large IT departments have qualification processes for introduction of new solutions, for measuring their quality, reliability and scalability, and I would have assumed that descriptions of how best to manage these - under real world conditions - would occupy more of the text.
The concept of making the customer more explicitly aware of the costs of IT services is mentioned, but this is not expanded to a discussion of vendor management. With the advent of transaction based pricing strategies (e.g. Salesforce.com) it seems to me that software vendors may at last be forced to improve quality and customer service - as opposed to getting paid up-front licences and reluctantly providing 'support', I would have welcomed an insiders view of whether this is a trend that's actually bearing fruit or yet more hype.
The research cited seems to be quite survey based, and left me feeling that just as in industry it's difficult to map IT-values to business values so in Information Systems research there is an absence of hard-numbers (and perhaps rigour?). This left me with the feeling that most of the research quoted was good on proposing frameworks, but unconvincing due to its being based on survey and observations.
A couple of smiles.... To an outsider there are a number of unintentional insights into the corporate world. Through the text we had been introduced to Intel's CIO - a man, then mid-way through (page 177) we are introduced to a woman who is 'Intel's other CIO'. Presumably this is a transitional arrangement, but, on first sight, it occurred to me that Intel might be taking its failover strategy a bit too far.... . Also 'Directionally correct' is a term used through the book, and in the context seems to mean 'roughly accurate', but each time I read it I kept substituting 'close enough for government work', which I presume is not the intention at all.

Overall this is a solid outline of the requirements for systemised management practices within the IT function. The book provides a framework which IT management (and their customers) can use for self-assessment and goal setting, and outlines a number of tools and processes by which Intel's IT department attempts to provide explicit value to its corporate customers.


Rating:
Summary: Interesting topics, poor analysis
Review: The topics presented in this book are very interesting. Areas such as IT value chain are not well explored by IT practitioners and academics. The author attempts to answer burning IT management issues, but fails to present any significant analysis or solution.

Rating:
Summary: Nice read
Review: This book provided me with some helpful insights on certain aspects I overlooked in regards to IT managment. I was able to integrate some of this knowledge into my line of work.