CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology (Wiley and SAS Business Series) [Hardcover]

Joe Stenzel (Author), Gary Cokins (Author), Bill Flemming (Author), Anthony Hill (Author), Michael H. Hugos (Author), Paul R. Niven (Author), Karl D. Schubert (Author), Alan Stratton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470048689 | ISBN-13: 978-0470048689 | Publication Date: February 2, 2007 | Edition: 2nd

Are you a seasoned information technology (IT) executive looking for options available on leadership structures within your IT organization?   Look no further.  Now in a Second Edition, CIO Best Practices is an invaluable resource that provides a comprehensive, practical guide for CIOs and their executive team peers giving real-world examples of CIOs who have succeeded in mastering the blend of business and technology responsibilities and giving their companies a sound return on investment of technology dollars

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

What does it take to be a truly great Chief Information Officer (CIO)? What are the responsibilities and roles of today's CIO? CIO Best Practices is an invaluable resource filled with real-world practices used by CIOs and other IT specialists who have successfully mastered the blend of business and IT responsibilities. Compiled and coauthored by Joe Stenzel, this authoritative book assembles an unprecedented collection of pioneering and successful senior IT executives whose insights, drawn from years of practical experience, shed new light on the strategic opportunities?available for leadership structures within the IT organization.

A CIO's success is defined by personal business acumen, the ability to meaningfully communicate IT strategy, and most importantly, the proficiency to translate cutting-edge technology into usable ideas and solutions that promote business goals. For anyone who wants to achieve better returns on their ideas, CIO Best Practices reveals the concrete skills and competencies required of a CIO as well as a comprehensive strategic framework to fully leverage IT resources. Filled with real-world examples of CIO success stories, this proactive guide:

• Examines best practices
• Devotes an entire chapter to outsourcing and addresses the issues surrounding this challenging and controversial topic
• Guides readers through the changing role of the CIO and IT function planning
• Describes specific strategies for creating value

This practical resource provides best practice guidance on the key responsibilities of the CIO and the CIO's important role in modern organizations. It is the most definitive and important work on achieving and exercising strategic IT leadership for CIOs, those who intend to become CIOs, and those who want to understand the strategic importance of IT for the entire enterprise.

From the Back Cover

Praise for CIO Best Practices

"CIOs are challenged with bringing technology into alignment with business strategy. In order to be successful, today's CIO must translate the technical into business terms and to deliver solutions to the business to improve processes and end products. CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology provides a complete guide for the strategic CIO to help in these challenges. This book is a great tool for all CIOs."
—Ellen Barry, CIO, Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority

"The demand for value from technology investment will only increase in the future, and major business trends like globalization, consolidation, optimization, and consumerism demand that IT leaders find ways to engineer high performance, agility, lean, and innovation into the way businesses work and compete. Enlightened CIOs will want to read this book and ensure they understand the game plan for the future."
—Patrick E. Moroney, President, The Barnier Group LLC

"A terrific primer for technology professionals and a must-read for anyone aspiring to be a CIO or technology leader. This book focuses on the most relevant topics business and technology must grapple with including strategy development, strategic alignment and value creation, and the specific roles the CIO and IT must play. The book captures the collective wisdom of an impressive list of influential contributing authors who precisely frame and address the key issues CIOs must deal with today and for the foreseeable future."
—Stephen Fugale, Chief Information Officer, Villanova University, and former senior vice president and CIO, CIGNA Group Insurance

"CIO Best Practices captures many of the things we have learned during our eight years of providing product outsourcing to U.S. companies. I recommend this book to anyone looking to quickly understand the decisions one will need to deal with before outsourcing."
—Anupam Bhide, PhD, CEO, CalSoft

With tactical advice by renowned IT leaders including Mike Hugos, Gary Cokins, Anthony Hill, and Paul Niven, CIO Best Practices eloquently describes the process of bringing together a deep understanding of technology with an intimate awareness of an industry's strategic leverage points.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 2nd edition (February 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470048689
• ISBN-13: 978-0470048689
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm an author, speaker, award-winning CIO and principal at Center for Systems Innovation [c4si]. I work with clients to find elegant solutions to complex problems, with focus in supply chains, IT and business agility, and new business ventures. Earlier I spent six years as CIO of a national distribution organization where I developed the suite of supply chain and e-business systems that transformed the company's operations and revenue model. For this work I won the CIO 100 Award for resourcefulness, the InformationWeek 500 Award for innovation and the Computerworld Premier 100 Award for career achievement.

Google searches on "business agility", "IT agility" and "agile organization" return articles of mine on the first page. I've spoken at conferences and taught seminars in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. I write a blog for CIO magazine titled "Doing Business in Real Time" and have authored and co-authored seven books including my popular Essentials of Supply Chain Management, and my newest book - Business in the Cloud: What Every Business Needs to Know about Cloud Computing. I earned my MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

I can be reached via my website - www.MichaelHugos.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read This Book ...It Is Excellent!, May 19, 2007

By 

Dean Lane (San Jose, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology (Wiley and SAS Business Series) (Hardcover)

As someone who has been a CIO four times, served as an interim CIO too many time to count, wrote "CIO Wisdom" and will be coming out with "CIO Perspectives", I would like to fully endorse "CIO Best Practices". Somewhere in the book it states "all CIOs live in a competitive world and excellent customer relationship management has become a competitive advantage" This book accomplished "excellent customer relationship management" by always keeping the reader in mind. It is well written, and contains depth that could only be written by CIOs.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars CIO Best Practices, March 13, 2008

By 

S. Evans (Oklahoma) - See all my reviews

This review is from: CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology (Wiley and SAS Business Series) (Hardcover)

Generally, I liked the book "CIO Best Practices". I believe that it contained a lot of useful information for employees in the IT field whether they are CIOs or new employees in the industry. Many IT departments lose focus of the fact that their purpose is to support the company's mission and get sidetracked by the wow factor of technology and end up pursuing change for change sake. "CIO Best Practices" has many useful guidelines for aligning the IT department with the overall corporate strategy. I worked in IT and speak from experience.
Of particular use to the Chief Information Officer were concepts on how to make sure that all your efforts are spent to ensure you deliver value-added solutions to the firm that ensure not only the companies existence but also, possibly, competitive advantage. Some of the practices mentioned included focusing on providing deliverables in 3-6 month intervals, building on existing technology, avoiding projects that are beyond the capability of the company to support, proving ROI on projects before undertaking them so as to avoid ad hoc projects, and many other often overlooked IT principles.
Chapter 3, "A Strategically Focused, Tactically Agile IT Organization" was insightful and covered useful IT tools such as the Boyd Cycle, Six Sigma, and a Define, Design, Build model. Together these tools form a continual process of sensing opportunities, establishing and enacting a plan to utilize the opportunity, and means of improving upon processes. By far this was the most enjoyable chapter of the book and I believe that these practices would be useful to many other industries and not only Information Technology.
The chapter on Outsourcing was also interesting to me. Even though outsourcing has been around for a while I had not given much thought to the practicality of geographical location to help facilitate designing software during people's normal working hours in one part of the world and having it tested in another part of the world during those individuals' normal working hours. We often conceptualize a continuously operating business but we tend to think of the graveyard shift when we do.
Overall the book was not too difficult to read, although I found the writing style of Chapter 4 unstimulating. Reading this book was assigned as part of an accounting assignment and I do believe it would help an accountant better understand the job of a CIO.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Would Recommend for CIOs and Others Interested in IT Management, March 2, 2008

By 

S. Polakow - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology (Wiley and SAS Business Series) (Hardcover)

As an accounting student without much IT experience, the book was a very difficult read at times. Considering that it was written for chief information officers, however, I think the authors actually explained the concepts very clearly, without getting overly technical.
The first chapter gives a good procedure for aligning the IT department's goals with those of the firm. It also gives guidelines for effective project management. Chapter two is probably the most difficult for someone with very little IT experience to grasp. It explains enterprise architecture and its link to corporate governance.
The third chapter was my personal favorite. It explains how to create an agile IT department using three "agility loops" with supporting processes. These procedures allow the firm to stay strategically focused while creating new processes and improving existing processes.
I didn't really care for chapter four, which describes strategy mapping and explains how to use activity-based-costing as a tool for implementing strategic IT finance. I found the fifth chapter more interesting as it defines the balanced scorecard and explains how to apply it to the IT department.
Chapter six gives an interesting explanation of the need to place a value on customers and details the procedures and formulas needed to do so. Chapter seven gives reasons why a firm should consider outsourcing and outlines a plan for outsourcing once the decision to do so has been made. The final chapter describes how to measure the ROI of an IT project and recommends managing a group of projects as you would an investment portfolio.
Overall, the book seems well written and I would recommend it for CIOs and others who are interested in IT management.