24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An attempt to revolutionize business and IT, but it can easily reinforce business stereotypes of IT, March 16, 2010
This review is from: 8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT (Paperback)
Susan Cramm provides a comprehensive and detailed description of the current state of IT and the friction IT has with the business. The book reflects Cramm's significant experience with existing IT models and practices.
Cramm's point is that "No rational person hates the people within IT, but everybody, IT and business leaders alike, hate the current IT system." Page 155. Cramm intends to address this point by having the business participate this current system.
Unfortunately, the book's advice is to have the business executives get more involved with the practices of the current IT system that everyone hates. This becomes apparent as you read the book and understand its central premise that it's the business's responsibility to make IT work.
I do not recommend sharing this book with a business executive to get them to suddenly wake up and say - yes I have been neglecting IT all these years and it is my fault. Cramm suggests that business leaders will come to this revelation on their own. (pages 141-144) The book does not make a strong enough argument backed by real examples of how this works.
If you are going to convince business leaders to spend more time on IT, then you need to present hard evidence, what others are getting by spending more time. You cannot just assert that it is the right thing to do. I can see where a business leader could read the book and take away the idea that this is IT restating old arguments and shifting responsibility away from IT and onto the business. That is an understanding may do more damage than help.
Weill and Ross's book IT Savvy does a better job and is heavily footnoted in this book. I recommend IT Savvy as the book to give to executives to understand more about why they should pay attention to and invest in IT.
This is a book that IT professionals will gravitate toward and IT analysts will praise for its accurate and compelling discussion of the core IT principles and how they address the fundamental tensions between IT and the enterprise in terms of the 8 things we have about IT. In that regard it is better for IT professionals than for the business.
The 8 things are helpful as an accounting of what is wrong in IT and the IT business relationship, but Cramm stops short of providing the level of advice, tools or insight into how to improve on the situation. An example is the discussion of business cases (p. 73-77), which basically says you do a business case to get projects priorities. A few sentence discussion of using a case to drive benefits realization is on page 97.
Here are the strengths and challenges that I see and are the basis for my comments.
Strengths:
* Recognizing that the business / IT relationship has reached a critical state that has an impact on business performance and their competitive future.
* Cramm does a good job of pointing out the tension between a business unit specific view on their operations, versus IT's common need to take all business units into account and have an enterprise view. This is a powerful point and one of the things at the root of the relationship that could have built upon.
* Well structured around the tensions that pull at the business and IT relationship along terms that both business and IT professionals will recognize.
* The tool on how well you are managing the IT asset (p. 145) is helpful and would have been better placed at the start of the book so the business reader could understand how much of this applies to them.
* The description of the core/common IT processes is clear and accurate providing business leaders with an understanding of the practices they need to participate in.
Challenges:
* The intended audience for the book is the business executive who is reading to be convinced to spend more time with IT and follow IT processes and practices. Unfortunately the text can get confusing as the book slips into tech tone and provides only a general reasons why executives should spend their time with IT versus concentrating on other tasks.
* Cramm's argument assumes that IT is the way it is and cannot be expected to change. The possibility that the standard IT practices in the book may not be effective at attracting the right level of business attention is not seriously addressed.
* The book does not contain examples of what to do, what works, the experiences of real CIOs and business leaders facing this situation. This gives the book a disconnected feeling that will not convince an executive to give up a portion of their scarcest resource.
* The advice is uneven in places. The advice is not new and these are standard practices. The author does not take advantage of new developments that are specifically intended to address these issues. For example, the book quotes Weill and Ross's work in multiple places, yet the governance advice offered does not recognize Weill and Ross's groundbreaking, actionable and practical work.
* The book organizes itself around the 8 things, but it also tries to organize itself around the IT investment process. This makes the structure a little confusing. It also gives the business reader the impression that their only involvement is to get IT projects approved, rather than realizing value from IT.
I am sorry, but I do not believe that the book will get the executive to understand IT, appreciate it or be willing to invest more of their scarce time in this staff function. Here is a final example from the book:
"What IT professional in her right mind has the time or inclination to go out looking for what might be when it's hard enough dealing with what is? Yet this is exactly what business leaders want their IT organization to do. They want IT to show them how to exploit the current tools and discuss future possibilities about how IT can be used to drive the business. This never gets to the top of the IT priority list. " Page. 127.
Paraphrasing this quote: IT cannot do its current job; much less create the innovation the business wants, so innovation that drives the business does not get done.
That is why, I believe that while Cramm has done a nice job covering IT's traditional relationship gap with the business, the book does not provide enough to achieve the goal of having the business engage in IT's current set of practices and processes.
It is hard to write a less than stellar review and if you have read this far I hope that you can see the rational for the points I have written. Thanks.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cramm Gets It; Now for the Rest of Us, May 28, 2010
This review is from: 8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT (Paperback)
I've been in the business of applying technology to business for 45 years. Cramm's book squares well with my 36 years of in IBM working directly with clients on their issues. For the last nine years I have applying that experience in higher education. There is nothing in this book that I have not encountered and been occasionally bloodied by.
Cramm is on target in a clear and clarifying way about what needs to be done by business if the potential value of technology is to be realized. Crisp writing (except for the occasional "yank the bandage off" phrase) regarding the critical issues is engaging and informative. Cramm's critique of the approach to managing the IT assets is constructive with suggestions as to what to do liberally sprinkled throughout the easy-to-read book.
This is a recommended read for the executive who is wondering what to do about IT. I would likely make it assigned reading for my client executives were I still in the consulting business. As it is, I have some other ideas as to how to use the book in the context of some of my current responsibilities.
It is regrettable that the issues and recommendations are too easily recognizable by many of us who have been in IT for a long time. One is left to wonder how much progress has really been made in generating value through the application of IT. Perhaps this points to a void in the higher education curriculum.
It occurs to me that a subtitle for this book could be "We have met the enemy and he is us." Ah, the prescient Pogo.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What I Wish I Had Said..., April 16, 2010
This review is from: 8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT (Paperback)
OK, as an IT guy- I love this book. Even if it is about hating IT.
The truth is that the things Susan Cramm identifies as hated by business people are things that we in IT aren't so crazy about either.
The real value in this book is Susan's plea for the folks on the "business" side of the house to own their IT; to think of it as THEIR tool for getting THEIR work done as opposed to a kind of neutral service that should do their bidding. That kind of attitude change would make a tremendous difference in an organization's ability to leverage its systems for real competitive advantage.
There are practical suggestions here for building the sort of partnership that we need between business and IT. I think that those suggestions are both realistic and attainable, even if they are likely to nudge us all out of our comfort zones. In other words, don't expect just a theoretical discussion of how things oughtta be... there's real guidance for how to get there.
As for readability- I rarely use a highlighter in a book, but a quarter of the way through this one, I made an exception. It's full of interesting factoids and quotable quotes and I wanted to be able to find them again when I needed to steal them.
Finally, for what it's worth, I also enjoyed what struck me as a uniquely female sensibility around some of the thought here. Two quick examples...
In relaying an illustration of one IT manager's plight she describes his much-cultivated business alignment as being "like the alignment of a husband and wife with separate bedrooms and separate vacations."
Later she says that "Dealing with the typical IT department is like trying to date someone difficult. There's the promise of something life-changing, but the day-to-day realities are painful...".
There are about 50 manager-level business leaders in our organization. I'm seriously thinking about getting every one of them a copy of this book, in hopes that they will find themselves captured by the compelling story-telling before they realize that they've had their thinking changed.
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