Customer Reviews

Innovating IT: Transforming IT From Cost Crunchers to Growth Drivers

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I was told by my colleagues who read this book before me, that this is a VERY controversial book. Inspiring to some, scary to others. I'm not kidding about "scary".

A favorite business associate of mine sent it to several of his company's contacts (me included) as a Christmas gift. Using this book as a corporate gift was a suggestion by one of the very bright people at his company (I say "bright" not just based upon her recommendation to make the book a gift, but because I met her years ago and was impressed). So I read the book right away.

This book is the best business gift I have ever received.

What you read next is not an explanation of what is in the book. You can read that elsewhere. It's an explanation of why you probably need to read this book right away as opposed to later.

If you are a senior executive who job involves creating company growth or making decisions, or if you work in IT, you should know that this book describes the inevitable future of IT. But I must caution you: if you read it, you will not be able to get this vision of IT out of your mind.

What's worse, if you believe that your company cannot move towards this vision, you will be stuck with another thought, a frightful one--what if your competitors do?

I think I understand why this book would be so controversial. It's because we already know the power that information technology has. It has already significantly transformed many aspects of our lives. We know that accomplishing the vision in Arussy's book IS technologically possible.

After all, the implementation involves writing computer programs and putting them to work. But the DESIGN of those programs is the challenge, for that's a HUMAN task.

This means that accomplishing this vision, which is the inevitable future of IT, depends much less upon technology that it does upon people. Not upon a few people here and there, but many people throughout our companies, figuring this all out and working together on it. That thought could be a little scary in itself, depending upon how well we're doing generally on working together these days.

It could also mean a great opportunity for you and your colleagues. But maybe not an easy one.

Figuring out what our businesses really need--what's of critical importance--and designing that is the real challenge. We would have to face the fact that we don't know many aspects of our businesses and our business colleagues well enough to pull it off. At least not yet.

Just because Arussy's vision, at this moment, seems impossible doesn't mean that it's not inevitable.

In 1980 (before the PC), a restaurant that seated 100 people would have had 2 or 3 wall-mounted pay phones on the wall. Today at most restaurants I've been to, the pay phones are gone. Why? Out of 100 customers, nearly all of them have carried their own telephones into the restaurant with them. If in 1980 someone had told you that pocket phones were going to make pay telephones practically extinct in 20 years, you wouldn't have thought that to be very relevant to your life, maybe because you'd be thinking that the technical and financial challenges involved would be practically insurmountable. Science fiction stuff. You may have believed that it would be inevitable, but you probably would not have concluded that the idea would significantly impact your life. But it did.

Yet that's not the most important point.

The funny thing with cell phones is that even though cell phone technology doesn't work that well yet ("Can you hear me now?"), and even though we know the advertising claims about coverage areas are exaggerated, and even though we know we won't be 100% satisfied with the service, we buy and continue to upgrade our cell phones anyway and wouldn't be without them.

To me this means (and I think this is the most important point) that we don't have to get Arussy's vision 100% right. If cell phones are any indicator, we only have to be pretty effective most of the time on this vision to revolutionize our businesses, and to get our return on investment. We can tweak it from there.

So--who will be first? You and your company, or your competitors?

This book hits the bulls-eye. IT isn't about bits and bytes, servers and up-time anymore - we need to move on up. These are the real tools to help any company's IT group make a concrete business contribution.