| Welcome to vBulletin FAQ |
vBulletin FAQ Navigation
Getting Started
Customizing your vBulletin
Search Engines & SEO
Making Money with a Forum
Promoting your Community
|
| Get your own vBulletin Today |
|
| Webmaster Help |
|
|
|
Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value Through Technology
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with B
|
Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value Through Technology |
Author: Patrick Gray
Published: 2007-11-02 |
List price: $49.95
Our price: $37.96
|
Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: November 20th, 2008 08:30:06 AM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 From Theory to Practices
Each year CIO Magazine's top IT initiatives lists "Aligning IT with Business Units" as one of CIO's readers' top goals. It's clear that IT management is hungry to work hand-in-hand with business units -- but it's not at all clear how to accomplish that goal. Some people recommend "using business language instead of technology jargon." Others propose playing golf with colleagues from business units. Still others recommend getting an MBA. While each of these is valuable in its own right, none of them really get to the heart of the matter: how do you manage IT *as* a business unit and infuse the company's objectives in every day processes and planning? "Breakthrough IT" addresses this with practical methods of moving IT from an operations focus to a strategy focus.
br /
br /The book contains sections on creating the right employee base, applying portfolio analysis to your project list, implementing project budgeting discipline, and (as a last resort) how to kill a project.
br /
br /If you want to move away from being a harried order-taker and become a peer of the other departments in your company, you owe it to yourself to read "Breakthrough IT."
br /
br /
IT Consultant Perspective
This book does a great job of taking several broad areas and tying them together. Most other IT books dig deeply into a single subject, whether its portfolio management or governance, and they don't always show how that area relates to others, or to an IT organization as a whole. They also tend to stray into such esoteric aspects of the topic they cover that they would not help the average executive. This book took all the key areas for a excellent IT organization: strategy, portfolio management, human resources, etc. and tied them together, showing how all the "moving parts" relate to get IT aligned with the business.
Great for the CEO and CIO
Breakthrough IT captures the essence of what your IT organization should be doing. The first few chapters break down the operating modes of most IT organizations, allowing the reader to identify their starting point, and contrast that with the author's concept of what IT should look like. The remaining chapters provide a fairly detailed "blueprint" of how to migrate towards this new IT organization. What I liked about this book is that unlike many other IT management books, it is not targeted exclusively towards techies. A CEO would be very comfortable reading the book and using to evaluate how their CIO and IT shop are performing, and using the book to trigger discussions and changes in both to make IT a stronger contributor to the company.
A must for managers
Breakthrough IT provides a great template on moving your IT organization from the old way of doing business, to what the author calls "Breakthrough IT." Basically it is an evolution from a cost-focused IT shop that is constantly trying to lower costs, to an IT organization that uses technology and process experience to generate returns. Each chapter builds upon the next, going over the transition to this new way of doing business in a very clear manner.
br / The book was easy to read, with executive summaries and action points in each chapter, which have proved helpful in discussing its points with peers and figuring out how to apply what I just read. It should prove helpful for C-level people and upper management that are tired of the "old way" of managing IT. I found the interviews with various C-suite exeuctives to be very insightful, and provide some real world examples of organizations that are at various stages of implementing the Breakthrough IT concepts.
|
|
Our vBulletin book picks:
|
|
Find more vBulletin related products of interest.
|
