Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

This book demonstrates the special knowledge and unique skills required to succeed as an exceptional best practices CIO. It gives the rationale for the enterprise-wide scope of that position, and lays out the recommended practices and concepts as well as case studies and practical examples of the application of these ideas, testifying to the rich experience and insight of its IT executive authors. "CIO Best Practices" is a useful reference and guide for both newly appointed and experience CIOs, as well as to aspiring CIOs. It is among the top group of recommended readings for all senior executives.

The title accurately reflects the contents of the book. There is a definite emphasis on the practical aspects of the CIO. This work is a good read both for the budding IT professional who is setting his/her sights on the CIO role or for the CEO, COO, CFO, who needs to better understand the critical role the CIO can and should play in an organization. The CIO's whose work is included in the book are a who's who of practicing CIO's. One would do well to read, and heed, what they have to say.

This book is pretty fundamental; nothing earth shattering but some good insight from a former CIO. Although I'm not a CIO, I am a manager that reports directly to the CIO so I thought this would be beneficial to my career. It's written well with examples from the author's own experiences and those experiences are valuable in that they illustrate the theory. It's a little redundant at times but I suppose that is to reinforce the key points. I just found myself skipping sections that had been covered at least once, sometimes twice before. I would still recommend it. It's an easy read.

A very good overview of various core issues that senior IT leaders (not just CIO's) face and how they can been approached. This covers such things as governance, performance, customer value, outsourcing, and ROI to name a few areas.

The book's title may lead one to believe that this is aimed solely at CIO's, but as mentioned above it covers topics that are very germane to all levels of IT leadership. In fact I would contend that this book is a smart read for any level of IT. Even if you are not looking to get into management, understanding the challenges and mindsets of your department's managers can only help you better achieve your own project ideas and goals.

My only complaint with this book revolves around the chapter on customer value. Having worked in this area of IT earlier in my career for a number of years, I did feel close to this material. That said and this chapter was far too granular for a book on best practices. It even goes so far as to offer up very detailed and complicated formulas for figuring out customer life-time value. While this information is important, it is much better found in more specific texts covering such things as marketing database practices, etc. The level of detail in this chapter was simply too much and quite out of place compared to the other chapters.

Overall a well written and interesting read that I certainly recommend.

I truly appreciate the straight-forward approach this book offers. Although this book does cover what a lot of us already do know, it is a great reminder of what we should be practicing. This book is a must have in any IT executives library.

In this compilation, renowned names in information technology describe managerial developments in their field for chief information officers (CIOs). Insiders Robert Stephens, Bill Flemming, Michael Hugos, Randy Betancourt, Alyssa Farrell, Jonathan Hujsak, Gary Cokins and Kurt Schubert - edited by Joe Stenzel - discuss IT leadership, social networking, social connectivity, cloud computing and energy efficiency. Sound management advice and a deep understanding of IT's strategic importance await patient readers. Due to their technical nature, getAbstract recommends these essays to IT specialists and active or aspiring CIOs eager to grasp the forces shaping IT.

I expected much more content from this book. The reality of CIOs nowadays is much more complicated then that outlined in the book.