Customer Reviews

Information Technology for Management: Improving Performance in the Digital Economy

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In short, this book does not teach about management. It hardly teaches anything useful about I.T. and it is not a quality resource for a graduate-level class.

Yes, the content, is all from very current sources. It was very impressive to see this textbook handled in a Fall '09 class when its published date is 2010. However, all that goes aside when reading the book's content. It takes very high-level definitions of commonly-known applications and somehow makes a subject matter out of them. For example, one of the questions in chapter 7 asks to "define the Wi-Fi revolution." I doubt that this buzzwordy term, along with the thousands of other buzzwords that comprise the bulk of subject matter in this book, was important for me to know in a management role. Throughout the book, they drop all kinds of odd abbreviations. In chapter 5, they refer to "EC", which is not defined anywhere in that or any of the previous chapters, and isn't clearly described until chapter 6, which is all about "E-commerce". Lots of e-this and e-that terms are peppered across the boldly-colored pages.

Every other page has something that could be considered a "sidebar" - a large sub-article that is relative to the content of that section - that ends up consuming the entire page. This breaks up the continuity of the book when trying to read through. I will go through a plain white page with black text, see the paragraph wrap in mid-sentence, turn the page expecting to see the rest of the paragraph, and then the page is blue with a whole separate article in a different font. I understand that textbooks do this from time-to-time to add in knowledge relevant to the content, but this happens with the turn of *every* page. The sidebars themselves are discontinuous, all exploding in different shades of pink, blue, or green.

Many of the graphics drawn in the book make no sense. The section on Data Visualisation tells us that graphics are supposed to convey knowledge as drawn from a data source so the information can be understood easily (e.g., a graph). The artists of this book must not have read that chapter.

I'm halfway through the book now and am about to take my midterm this Sunday. Having read half a textbook on IT Management, I haven't read one bit about PMP certification, which is a global standard for project managers. I'm disappointed and will certainly inform my school of this, but I wanted to inform any potential institutions that this textbook is full of fluff and needn't be used.

I am doing a Masters Information System degree. And this was a required textbook.

However, it is fairly well written and easy to follow. But the information within was dated and a bit old. Frankly textbooks are passe and should no longer be required; especially for an IT program.

Has anyone heard, "Moving at the speed of business?" Well, the authors should realize that most of the material was outdated - what is faster than the Internet?

It's good as a resource, but...

-Because of tables and stories and lists it's difficult to keep the narrative thread of the material, headings sometimes start on the bottom of pages

-The authors are in love with RFID technology!

-They sometimes repeat things and similar material is spread out among different headings and chapters, instead of being grouped together.

Good Book! Needed it for an Mgmt Information Systems Course in Fall 2011. Loved that you could do control+f to look for certain items in the books. Very easy to use. A little expensive but cheaper than the physical book.

This book has been very useful to maintan myself updated about information technology improvments, like social networking, cloud computing, web 2.0

Lots of business examples and non-profit mini-cases for in-class discussions. Covers topics that are important today--environment-friendly IT, security, competition.

book in excellent condition. i do wish they would be able to ship to Puerto Rico because taht is where I live and it has to go to my sisters'house in the states to them be shipped to me. Extra days that could be spared if sent directly.