Customer Reviews

The Executive's Guide to Information Technology

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am the CTO of a small financial services company. I read this book to see what recommendations the authors were making about IT organization and use in larger firms, ostensibly as a roadmap for where to take my department. Many of the ideas within the book (change controls, division of labor, alignment with business goals) can be found elsewhere, but Baschab and Piot have pulled it all together created a reference guide for IT managers.

Based on my personal experience, many of their recommedations are on target. Most small- and many medium-sized organizations can benefit from their recommedations, although not without modification. It can only benefit an IT manager whose department is growing to be alert for instituting the ideas Baschab and Piot discuss, especially concerning controls, risk and organization.

One final note: it would have been interesting for the authors to discuss how small IT departments should implement their recommendations as they grow.

The author's depth of experience in optimizing corporate IT departments clearly shines through in this well-written guidebook. Their philosophy for optimizing the IT function is unique and is a refreshing break from many of the "how to boost ROI" books frequently found in this genre. The text is obviously written from a perspective of a CEO/CFO/CIO, but the information is applicable at all levels in corporate IT departments and is particularly useful to IT consultants advising executives responsible for corporate technology.

In addition to their unique perspectives and philosophy, the book is loaded with pragmatic advice and methodologies that can be used immediately to put their advice into practice. For example, I found the chapter on vendor selection especially useful and immediately actionable. Using their comprehensive methodology, I was able to help my client effectively move through what would have otherwise been an arduous and oblique process while avoiding some potentially very expensive pitfalls. This chapter alone was worth the price of the book.

Overall, I highly recommend this book.

The Executives Guide to Information Technology is an excellent resource that is a must have for IT managers and top executives that want to get the most out of their IT investments. Every IT manager and executive should read this book to understand how to effectively manage information technology for business value. Likewise, non-IT managers and executives will learn a great deal about the inner-workings of IT and how to work with their IT brethren in the most effective way for the greatest benefits to their company. (CFOs specifically will find this book incredibly illuminating and useful).

The book is extremely well organized and presents a well-balanced mixture of academic analysis and tested practices. The sheer knowledge and hard earned personal experiences of the authors comes through in every chapter. The descriptions of the challenges facing IT will resonate clearly with anyone who has ever held an executive position within an enterprise IT team. The solutions presented are equally clear and easy to follow. Overall, the book is simply packed with techniques for recognizing challenges, accurately assessing the current state of any component of IT, comparing that state to a target benchmark and developing actionable improvement plans. Finally, the CD-ROM included with the book contains all the spreadsheets, documents and checklist tools needed to put Baschab and Piot's sage advice to immediate use.

In addition to being a highly informative volume, this is ultimately, as the title implies, a guidebook loaded with recipes for IT investment optimization success. After reading it, I suggest placing it on or near your desk where I am sure you will refer to it again and again. Also, I think that buying a copy of this book for each of their key IT managers would be one of the wisest investments a budget-squeezed CIO could make. I highly recommend it.

The Executive's Guide to Information Technology is book focused on the "business" pieces of managing IT, such tasks as IT organization design, vendor selection and management, communicating with business users, IT human resource management, establishing IT steering committees and managing the overall demand within the IT department. The book fills the gap between abundant vocational "how to" books and the business of managing the whole IT function.

Overall the book does a good job making the case that the key principles it outlines are the best predictors of a successful IT department. The book is replete with real-life, and often humorous anecdotes from the authors experiences in turning around distressed IT departments. IT managers will quickly recognize many of the symptoms of an IT department in trouble. The book is written in a fairly readable, conversational tone, and there are charts and graphics throughout to further explain key points.

At just over 500 pages, the book is lengthy compared to competing offerings. However, it is written in a way that lets the reader pick and choose specific chapter topics, without losing much of the context. Additionally, the book includes a CD-ROM with documents, spreadsheets and links to the underlying research that went into the book, making the book a good value.

In all, the book is a relatively easy read, thought-provoking, and a great reference for IT managers (or aspiring managers) who want to learn to think like senior executives and ensure that their IT departments are running on all cylinders.

...

Highlights:

Opening chapters on "why MIS departments matter" and the symptoms of under-performing IT departments.

Vendor selection and vendor management chapters.

IT steering committee chapter - why have one, what it can help IT accomplish.

IT budgeting chapter - shows key components of IT budgdet, how-to's and benchmarking information.

Nice forward by a Prof from Harvard.

Lowlights:

Portion of chapters on IT organization describing in painstaking detail the exact roles and responsibilities for every position on the IT team. This stuff needs to be there to make the book comprehensive, but not new news for experienced IT professionals.

This book has all the practical advice that I wish someone had told me at the start of my IT career. Instead of another course on programming or the 15th version of some algorithm, this book has the stuff that helps you think like an executive and move forward in your career.
The topics covered include everything you need to know about how an IT department really works - operations, applications, networking, etc. at a non-technical management level. A good book to buy if you are an IT exec or want to get there and run with the big dogs.

Few people know that I was responsible for developing the original advanced information technology applications in pilot (artificial intelligence, expert systems, natural language understanding, smart maps with a memory of operational history, etcetera) for the CIA, and served on both the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group and on the Information Handing Committee, both national level secret bodies. I also stood up the USMC Intelligence Center (today a Command) and wasted $20 million on the wrong high-end "stuff" while neglecting access to external content.

This book has an identity problem. On the one hand, it claims to be a guide for executives (who: CEO, corporate vice presidents, division chiefs?), and on the other, it provides an enormous amount of detail about managing the information technology investment and operations--information I would expect my CTO to have firmly in hand before he or she ever got hired.

This book (second edition published in 2007) also fails to mention:

Analytics or analytic tradecraft
Anomaly detection
Cloud computing
Data mining
External sources
Knowledge management
Pattern analysis
Semantic web
Social networks
Warning
Web 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0)

Return on Investment (RoI) is defined on page xvi and not mentioned again, at least according to the index, which is where I decide whether a large volume is worth my time. This index--this book--failed that test.

Decision making gets one reference (page 525), decision trees get two pages (310, 467).

Business intelligence and competitive intelligence do not appear in this book (according to the index).

Risk management focuses on management of the IT investment risk, not on risk management of every aspect of the organization from personnel to facilities to production to inventory to supplier vetting and so on.

Bottom line: this is a university primer for kids hoping to one day be a Chief Technology Officer. It is NOT a guide for executives. It is a summary of what the top three CTO folks should have in their DNA from day one (which is often not the case).

I am guided in my crankiness by Peter Drucker, who wrote in Forbes ASAP of 28 August 1998, that we have spent the last fifty years focusing on the T in IT, and now need to spend the next 50 years focusing on the I in IT. Generally, IT provides both a *negative* return on investment, and does nothing to create, nurture, and exploit "organizational intelligence." Enough said.

Other books that I prefer to this one:
The Politics of Information Management: Policy Guidelines
The Business Value of Computers - An Executive's Guide (Information Technology Findings and Recommendations)
Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age
Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization
The Knowledge Executive
The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

See also the books I have published.

This is an excellent book with regard to understanding and managing technology.

Each chapter is filled with so much information, it begs the reader to slow down and soak up the surprising and insightful statistics about IT.

What's so unique about John's book is that he's writing to thousand of IT professionals, and yet it feels as if he has spent time in your department interviewing your staff and clients personally. That's how poignant this book is.

John's ability to explain complex and dynamic problems in easy to understand language using anecdotes and allegories is uncanny. The book is founded on fundamental truths and principles that have been around for ages. It's John's ability to bring these principles to life by practically applying them to the circumstances we face very day. This makes the book both practical for the here-and-now as well as the IT professionals of tomorrow.

I have used many of the templates suggested in this book and find them easy to understand, quickly deployable, and readily accepted by team members and clients. It's surprising, but it is the simplicity behind the templates that makes them so usable and effective. As mentioned many times in the book, applying complex technological solutions to simple requests is a common problem within IT.

This book is like an IT bible. It's not something you read once and put on the shelf. It's something that should be referenced often. Whenever you feel you might want to consult with Booz.Allen or McKinsey... reach for this book first.

I am about half way through this book, and I have to say it has been a life saver. I found other related books to be too entry-level to be helpful, but this book seems to hit the target with some heavy-duty advice for the experienced IT manager.

I found out about the book on Nicholas Carr's website where he recommended it...

see: related readings
Two texts from Michael Porter, the book Competitive Strategy and the article What Is Strategy?, are essential for understanding the relationships among industry structure, firm strategy, and competitive advantage. An extremely lucid overview of the current state of thinking about business strategy can be found in Richard Whittington's What Is Strategy - and Does It Matter? Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad provide insight into the relationship between corporate capabilities and competitive advantage in their classic article The Core Competence of the Corporation.

On the technology side, Porter's Strategy and the Internet diagnoses the failures of e-strategy. Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian take a cold look at the economics of digital business in Information Rules. For a lively account of the commercial and social impact of the telegraph, see Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet. For a solid, practical overview of corporate information management today, consider Jon Piot and John Baschab's weighty The Executive's Guide to Information Technology.

Hope this is helpful...

A must-read for IT managers. Even for IT staff. The book is very detailed and thorough. It outlines how to effectively manage the IT department.

I bought the hardcover version of this book. Rather than expensing it to my employer, I chose to pay for it myself.

Why?

I want to take it with me if I move on from here. This book is such a valuable reference and incorporates so many (expensive) well respected sources that it is well worth the $60 to me.

Very useful and I am planning to buy the next edition.