Customer Reviews

Information Technology for Management: Transforming Organizations in the Digital Economy

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

Information Technology for Management, while a nice paperweight, provides little more than an illustrated dictionary of IT related terms. Its chapters feature lengthy and overly verbose descriptions of fairly basic terms, and far too many case studies and examples. Of course, such examples are important, however the present work tends to rely upon third-party analyses of IT/IS installations, making one wonder whether Turban, McLean, and Wetherbe are in fact authors, or merely just librarians compiling information for this seemingly derivative work.

Moreover, the text includes a significant number of charts and diagrams, many of which are provided with little explaination and often serve to confuse, rather than to clarify specific points.

Those wishing to learn more about information technology as well as professors considering adopting this text, would be strongly urged to consider some of the many other, perhaps more appropriate, texts available in the rapidly growing field of information technology for management.

This is one of the worst books on IT and business. It's seems to take the worst of business and IT and thrown it all together. Also the Wiley site has premade powerpoint presentations and quizes\tests to accompany this book...so intructors or professors (at least the one I have at the Univ of Maryland) do nothing but use these pitiful slides without edit and the test questions that are probably the worst I have ever seen....save your money and dont buy this book...and if your thinking about taking a grad school course that uses this book...think twice...

In the MIS department of a multinational company, the survival skills are not thorough knowledge of VB, ASP, PowerBuilder or JCL, but the overall understanding of company's huge system. You don't do coding step by step by ask for outsourcing. This book shows the computer system blueprints of big corporations. When you bosses ask you about what's the future of company Intranet, you better be able to give him/her a satisfactory answer in terms of company¡¦s overall profit/loss.

But if you want to be a creative professional, this book might let you down. Chapter 3 Caterpillar's case study is back to 1993. This book emphasizes too many advantages from IT and ignores many hazards. The EDI case study seems too good to be real. EDI is good, even though Internet is prevailing. But before the system can function properly, many people will suffer from system implementation, such as data missing, counterpart's delay and so on. Even if a field missing on EDI can cause your system stop operation. Besides, I believe most of the corporations in this world already had EDI linkage by 98. Probably it's too late to mention EDI at Y2K. But for a university student who has never heard EDI and other IT things, this book is worth reading.

Information Technology for Management (Making Connections for Strategic Advantage) is a glossy compendium (or better: hotchpotch) of IT and related management concepts. Many important aspects are touched only at the surface or not at all and vagueness is pervasive throughout the book. There are a lot of glossy illustrations and cartoons and the many website screenshots (which must have been taken with an old Mac version of Netscape) of well-known e-commerce examples such as Wellsfargo and Onsale.com are but one indicator for the level of the book. Another example is its simplistic listing of technical limitations of e-commerce, one being "the need for special Web servers in addition to the network servers" (is this the 1999 edition I'm looking at? yes...). Another "highlight" is "What Firewalls Cannot Do": they cannot protect from viruses is stated. No mention of OPSEC specification and available products. Having this book as a core reading in an MBA is worse than just having it bought by accident because then you actually have to read it. I have not heard any positive comments from other classmates on this book. The book tries to cover too many topics too superficially. Important new technologies such as XML are barely mentioned. Don't waste your time with this book if you can avoid it.

Considering that this book is in its second edition, it's interesting to note the number of bloopers in it. For instance, on page 519, there are 2 mistakes: one is a typo (no spell checker used); the other is grammatical (no editor used!). A serious omission is the impact of technology on leadership in organisations (at least this is a serious omission for a book so titled). The publishers (Wiley) probably have something to answer for as well, whereby the advertising doesn't match the product. This isn't the first time this has happened with them either. Normally it isn't a problem, but when you purchase through Amazon and you're in Australia, it's too much of an effort to squawk about the book not matching the expectations. I'm now going to contribute some comments about another Wiley publication ("Business Statistics: A Self teaching Guide"), where I'll continue my theme of books not living up to the hype.

Turban has created a book that does not fit the title. Rather than concentrating on IT management, he created an introductory book for managers new to IT. I was expecting to learn the all important steps of IT planning, lengthy discussions of ERP and networks, and the differences between mainframes and minis. Rather, we get brief overviews of these systems. Only one chapter is dedicated to ALL the types of planning. A completed plan isn't even included in the text!

If you are teaching an intro to IT for managers, this book is fine. For IT Managers though, look for something else.

The book contains numerous factual errors and omissions of crucial material. Textbooks like these that are so full of misinformation are responsible for why management fails to get along with engineers.

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TO BURN! I hate it and so does everyone else who has read it. The authors are smart but they wrote the book for bung-junkies who smoke doobies and don't care about information technology. To answer a question in chapter 2, you have to read chapter 10 first. That's great if you have 3-cheek buttloads of free time and you're high off of laundry detergent and paint thinner, but not for me. Why are the questions so stinking hard?!? I think this book is used to brainwash us and make us more compliable. (...)Please do not read this book and contribute the world-wide molestation of our minds!

This is one of the best (if not the best) book in this field, comprehensive, up-to-date, and to lay down the concrete and profound managerial framework in IT management (contrast to those books so abstruct or general for nothing to gain, or too IT technical to be so narrow or specific in its scope or to be obsolete in a few years). The strength of this book is the authors themselves who really understand (in theory and practice) both IT and Management fields, and to be able to integrate these two vast fields togather. I have used this book for my MBA MIS course that I have been teaching, and I recommend to read from cover to cover. I think that this book is a bargain!!

Technogy is playing anincreased role in manufacturing and services