Customer Reviews

Competing with Information: A Manager's Guide to Creating Business Value with Information Content

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This book is a collection of essays that cover the full spectrum if IS/IT management challenges and practices. The essays are grouped into three Part and further subdivided into topic sections within their respective parts. Although the main audience is IS/IT management, this book should also be read by business process owners who are the consumers of IS/IT services.

Part I is brief and sets the context by discussing the larger issues of competing with information and how to use information to create business value. This is the foundation of the rest of the book and is aimed at IS/IT managers and [in my opinion] business process owners. Part II (Putting Information to Work) begins with Section A's four chapters that tie information as processed and provided to the business to business goals and objectives. The value of these chapters is they educate the IS/IT manager in the business value of the services and products that they are providing and showing them the bigger picture of their roles in supporting business objectives. Section B (Creating New Reality) consists of two chapters that touch upon knowledge management issues to a degree, and certainly illustrate how information can be leveraged into actionable knowledge. Section C's two chapters address cost reduction, while Section D devotes two chapters to risk management and control.

The most interesting portion of this book is Part III, which is focused on how to use information as a competitive advantage. The five chapters in this Part starts with the basics of competing with information, and ends with a look at building e-commerce capabilities.

Overall, this book will provide IS/IT managers with a good foundation in business uses of information, which promotes a better understanding of IS/IT's role as a service provider and information manager. This is important because, from what I've observed at many clients, IS/IT is focusing more and more on tools and technology, or infrastructure building. The direct result of this focus is a growing chasm between what's important to the business and what IS/IT perceives its role to be. The essays in this book will go a long way towards educating IS/IT management and refocusing them on what is really important.

Donald Marchand has created a series case studies which describe how the leadership at different organizations used information collected during the course of business to better compete and even learn to dominate different aspects of their world. Well presented, but fragmented due to the nature of the case studies. The broad variation provide a reasonable footing for an executive who needs to get up to speed on what it means to truly leverage a company's information in the business world.