Customer Reviews

The Alignment Effect: How to Get Real Business Value Out of Technology

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I've read about a dozen books on the topic of strategic outcomes for IT. The "alignment" theme with various names is common in them all.
I expected this book to help me in my role as a strategic IT practices advisor.
After a thorough reading the book seems naive to me. It suggests only obvious practices. When real issues are mentioned, the answer is you need a product. The book seems like a paper about the authors product.
This is no case study. The book offers many stories to show a real problem exists. It doesn't give me any sense that this approach has been used before. This is my biggest complaint.
I'm expected by clients to make good recommendations. I would never suggest that my clients try such an approach, with or without the product. I believe the book is all form and little substance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In "The Alignment Effect", Hoque has capture the essence of what companies of all sizes wrestle with in achieving value for their technology investment.

As a CEO and former technology consultant, I would strongly suggest that people investing in technology invest in this book and understand it before spending one more dollar on technology. Once you do, the dollar you spend will be well-targeted in your organizations.

Daniel G. Magni
President/CEO
BeaconVision

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.

Well into the information age, the issue of the failure of information technology to deliver on its promise of real business value continues to trouble us. That Hoque feels compelled to bring this matter to our attention is an indictment of our commitment to sensible information technology management. The world's willingness to increasingly buy, yet not effectively improve the management of, information technology has amazed me for the 38 years I have been in the business. I somehow think I will continue to be amazed.

Hoque prescribes an approach to dealing with this issue that is understandable and can be put into action. Simply said, it is about understanding how a business works, how it can be configured to work better, how technology can enable this reconfiguration, and how the resulting benefits can be expressed in business terms.

Do not look in this book for a magic answer to resolve the issue. Indeed, there is no magic answer to be found anywhere. Attendance to the empirical facts of business and technology, and clear reasoning about them is the only way forward. Hoque provides useful guidelines for doing just this.

Some aspects of the book get in the way of clearly understanding Hoque's message. I think the metaphor of building a house has been overused with regard to enterprise architecture, and the illustrations associated with the Rauha Communications case are a trifle abstract.

Hoque's approach to Business Technology Management leads to the development of a considerable amount of useful information. One wishes that Hoque had dealt more clearly with how all of this is to be managed.

The final point is that cultural change is the paramount nemesis of Business Technology Management. We could benefit more from Hoque's experiences in overcoming this barrier to progress.

I have no hesitancy in recommending this book as an easy weekend read to the business executive finally willing to step up to his responsibilities of managing the information technology asset.

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.

Most of my customers for my consulting practice (ExecutiveSummary.com) are marketers. While "technology" and "marketing" used to be very far apart in most organizations, the Web and customer relationship management have changed that. Still, the biggest challenge for making CRM and other technology-fueled marketing programs work is the communication gap that often remains between these two vital business groups.

Marketers are at the front end of their businesses, innovating product development and finding ways to attract and retain happy customers. The huge technological advances of the past decade have created profound new ways to market products and communicate with customers. But a disconnect remains where marketers often underestimate technical complexities in their grand visions as "a simple matter of programming," while often the technologists they partner with focus foremost on what is technically possible or expedient at the expense of the actual business problem the marketer is trying to solve.

This book provides a solid framework for bridging that gap, importantly focusing also on the often-missing component of business processes. Process is often where innovative programs like CRM break down - where systems that are technically robust fail to address how people in the trenches are accustomed to doing their jobs.

The author Faisal Hoque does a remarkable job gaining real-world insights from how large companies have faced similar challenges, including the likes of Marriott Hotels, Chase Bank and General Electric. Although this book is not specifically directed towards marketers, I will be happy to recommend it to many of my clients as a way to help those at the front end of business (marketers) and those at the backend (technologists) understand how best to collaborate and align their roles to make technology serve marketing and business needs most effectively.