Customer Reviews

Corporate Information Strategy and Management: Text and Cases

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

 

 

This book only gets 2 stars from me because 3 or so chapters are actaully worthy of reading. The remainder compells the reader to gouge out their own eyeballs to avoid reading another sentence of the poorly written chapters. You'd think with having 3 authors they could do better than this but alas...no. Most likely you don't have a choice of whether or not to read this book however I am a better man for not having to read this book again. I'll be getting my MBA in 8 days and look forward to NOT reading books like this for the rest of my natural life. Best of luck, you'll need it.

Expensive and full of fluff. The authors simply love citing their own work. They do so at LEAST twice per chapter. All the cases in the book were written by the authors and the cases themselves are riddled with meaningless buzzwords and are just downright lame (e.g. "a lights-out data center"). Small wonder why the non-English speaking reviewer had problems. Poor guy.

It's obvious that the only opinions the authors value is their own. Beware of any class that requires this textbook because it means the professor has no idea what they are talking about. Just because you teach at Harvard does not necessarily mean you are smart or intelligent.

The problem with technologists is that they often become so enamored of the technology that they lose sight of its practical application. Happily, these authors have both a command of the technology and a keen ability to relate it to modern business. This text carries you seamlessly from the early days of computers as simply automation tools to the modern internetworked world. Solid case studies of both successes and failures illustrate the points. This is high-level stuff, and precisely the kind of book that not only students should read, but also every CIO and CEO.

I've studied in IT major and my professor use this book as the main text for this subject. Even though I'm not English/USA but I read many text book before. unlike the other texts, this book is pure nightmare.. use very bad language and very hard to intrepret what the author try to communicate..

Moreover, the picture in the text represent nothing. I get nothing from the figure and it's totally useless. I try to find a group of people and let all of them help to translate the books. Surprisly, most of them do not understand the text as well as I am and we cannot conclude what we can get from the book.

I ask the senior student who already pass the class I'm studing, all of them said that this is the worst text book that we had seen in thier real life.

- hard to read, (no common-fundamental word here.., author always use high level descriptive language )
- expensive
- dull
- case study that hard to understand / useless / old / not update
- lots of fussy comma.. will cause you headache.
- etc.

Finally, I advise that you do not purchase this title and all title compose by these author unless you already did read it first.

This book has several features that roll into a very useful action guide and reference manual. IT executives should keep this book on their desk, and refer to it every time they have a significant decision to be made.

The book covers the IT field at the business level, not at the detailed technical level. It treats the information management field from strategy formulation by the business, to operation and retirement of the IT asset.

In particular, at the end of each chapter are a series of 10-20 questions that any executive should ask every time she or he has to make judgements or decisions about IT. These questions can be used and re-used throughout an entire career, and will enhance the individual's performance.

I really don't know what to say about this book that hasn't been said already. You will loathe its perpetual and continuous use of buzzwords and useless, high-level diction used to explain simple concepts. I felt that most of the time, each segment in each chapter was trying to explain a topic that could have been stated in about 3 sentences, but they were trying to make those 3 sentences into 3 pages, so they loaded it up with a bunch of terms like "specialized enterprise solutions" and "defining strategic direction and operation". By themselves, those phrases aren't too bad, but when you have 20 pages with them over and over again and maybe 3 sentences worth of actual information, you will find yourself wanting to shove this book somewhere...

As the others said, once you get past chapter 4, the book becomes a little more technical, which is a good thing because it means it, by its very nature, can't use as many buzzwords to describe technical things. However it still does a bang up job of using as many as it can to make the textbook longer.

It suffers from that thing I like to call "I can't remember what I just read, even though I have just read it 3 times".

As another reviewer stated, the authors do continuously references their own previous work in every single chapter. However, since i never really cared to read the references, it didn't bother me, but it would explain why there is so much fluff and no real substance. Had the authors ventured out and actually gathered some information from a non-ivy league school, this book might have read easier.

I too wanted to gauge my eyes out. I hate books that are like this. I don't why in this day and age authors think people still want to read these kinds of books, where you have to study a page for 4 hours to take the meaning out of it. Not because the meaning is deep and hard to understand, but simply because its written so poorly that it just took you that long. It doesn't make me feel intelligent or important that I can read books like this. I get that its intended for MBA students but MBA students should understand that you shouldn't waste time when it isn't necessary.

That being said, I'm sure most people who actually buy this book need it for college courses, and aren't buying it because they actually just wanted it. The worst thing is when your professor actually wants to quiz you over the material in this book.

All I can say is good luck.

Overall, I have to rate this book a "meh", neither good nor bad. It's a disappointingly average textbook, and didn't make the final cut for inclusion on my permanent bookshelf. I think there is a good amount of useful information contained inside of it, but it's often difficult to get at. I consider myself a pretty good reader, but even I had to re-read portions of it multiple times before the information "sunk in". This book was for a graduate level MIS course and we covered it in the second half of a semester, which I think is sufficient time to read it in.

Concerns/observations:

- Very expensive.
- Little source material outside HBS.
- Detailed, but written using dense language. ESL students might have some issues here.
- Contained interesting cases, but all out-of-date. With a 2009 copyright, I expected more recent examples.
- Some chapters and appendixes are great (e.g. 1, 2 & 3, Porter's Five Competitive Forces), but most were just ok (and some just plain bad, e.g. 9).
- Beyond the cases, chapters were short on real-life, practical examples related to the chapter content. That was surprising and a big negative for me.
- Good illustrations. Others have pointed out lack of labeling or descriptions, but I think text covers them reasonably well.
- Excellent chapter ending questions.
- Not too technical, non-IT business people should be ok grasping the concepts.

If you are a business leader wading into the swamp of IT, or a business focused IT executive, you do need some tools. The book is strong on the fundamental issues behind outsourcing, and the whole role of IT and business models. The cases are well chosen, and some are highly insightful. I liked the IBM and Canyon Ranch cases best. They do a good job of tying in both Porter and Gary Hamel- the latter in the all important subject of change agency. The text comes up short in some areas, such as in networking, and they leave out any mention of ITIL and the Gartner IT Maturity Model. Both are NIH- Not Invented at Harvard. The number of self-references in the text must set a new record, and becomes a source of comic relief. If you add on a few outside articles and some newer cases you can cover the subject well in an MBA semester class.

My MBA professor said this was an excellent book, but it was HORRIBLE. Well, at the least the first four chapters were extremely, extremely bad. I could barely finish them--if the professor hadn't been excellent, and gone "outside the book" most of the time, it would have been the worst class I've every taken. After the first four chapters, the book became tolerable, and even somewhat enjoyable (for the technically oriented), but nothing makes up for the first four chapters. What the other negative reviews say is very true.

Very good case analysis for the non IT professional. Very good examples, utilizing thoughtful cases to provide a solid understanding of the Information Technology infusion into the business world. Very good text for the IT professional to understand the full context of the IT world into the basic business situation. Short cases are interesting and thought provoking when studied and analyzed in a classroom or personal situation.