The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership - Hardcover

McCormack, Ade

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470018534 ISBN 13: 9780470018538

Verlag: Wiley, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Value-driven IT focuses on how organisations can get the best value from their IT Investment. A program that involves the board and the business, the book also provides guidance and tools to carry out the exercise.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ade McCormack has over twenty years experience in the business-IT space. He is also a public speaker and coach. Ade has a column in the Financial Times advising business leaders on business-IT issues. He is also author of the acclaimed book – IT Demystified.
An astrophysicist by training, he entered the IT industry as a real-time embedded software engineer. Through Brownian motion his career recoiled into project management. Today he focuses more on people development, advisory, writing and public speaking in the IT value realisation space. Ade is married with one son and lives in the Chilterns in England. His interests include road / cross-country running and French jive, the latter being a form of dance which Ade has single handedly, and perhaps inadvertently, evolved into a martial art.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"This excellent book is a must read for anyone in business. As in his first book Ade McCormack demystifies IT and makes it clear, relevant and interesting for business."
―Dr Gerard Lyons, Chief Economist at Standard Chartered

"Ade McCormack hits at the key issues, the Business/IT relationship can no longer be one of master/slave, but must evolve into one of value based partnership for business advantage. An essential read for those organisations who believe there has to be a third way between traditional business and IT approaches."
―Eddie Short, Vice President, Global Lead - Business Information Management, Capgemini, London

Business people do not seem to understand technologists and the technologists do not seem to care. This is a problem when it comes to yielding best value from one’s IT investment. Other sources of value dampening lurk within the realms of strategy, processes, technology, services and governance.

This book is based on the author’s IT Value Stack methodology, which helps business leaders take control of their IT investment. Boardroom-bound CIOs will also find this book of value. As will those that advise on strategic business-IT matters.

The model is corroborated with input from influential people working within the world’s most successful end-user, business advisory and technology organisations.

Aus dem Klappentext

The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership

Successful IT value realisation is a cloudy subject. This in part contributes to the overall dissatisfaction many organisations have with IT. This book tackles the subject of IT value realisation head on. Most importantly it provides a model to help CIOs and business leaders maximise the return on their IT investment. The book covers:

• The IT Value Stack Model
• Business-IT strategy entwinement
• Process-IT entwinement
• User-technologist entwinement
• Technology management
• IT service management
• Circulation management
• Value management.
• Valuable input from influential contributors from the end-user, technology and advisory communities.

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The IT Value Stack

A Boardroom Guide to IT LeadershipBy Ade McCormack

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2006 Ade McCormack
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-01853-8

Chapter One

Do you have a Problem?

I made a number of observations in the introduction based on my experience in the IT industry. In this chapter we will explore these.

The IT Industry has a Poor Delivery Record

The IT industry has a poor delivery track record. Examples include:

Ford's web-based supply chain management system. Abandoned - 200 m written off.

McDonald's attempt to automate everything. Abandoned - $170 m written off.

Certainly, grand schemes do not appear to work. The much-heralded CRM (customer relationship management) systems, which promised to send sales skywards by consolidating the corporate view of the customer, are a notable failure. US analyst Gartner, at one point, suggested that over 50 % of CRM systems purchased were lying unused.

Recently, in The Economist, IBM's head of government services states that about 85 % of government IT projects are deemed to be failures. The problem of delivery is not confined to the dramatic. Mundane experiences such as lost data due to random word-processor crashes mid-document are common.

Why is it that we are so accepting of poorly performing IT systems, but are up in arms when a toaster behaves inconsistently? Is it that consumer rights do not exist in the world of IT, or is it that the IT user is not generally sophisticated enough to demand a better service?

Sadly, many individuals and organisations have become inured to the poor quality of the IT systems they pay for. Practically everyone has had a bad IT experience. I believe there are a number of reasons for this:

The IT industry is young and is simply not mature enough yet to deliver technically sophisticated enterprise-wide systems.

Information technology hardware is pretty reliable. That can be attributed to the mature engineering techniques used in design and manufacture. Sadly, engineering is a word that cannot be applied to software development. Unfortunately, it is the software that determines the value of the IT system to the user.

Those tasked with delivering IT systems typically spend an adequate amount of time integrating these systems into the users' infrastructure, but spend little time considering how to integrate the system with the users and the business processes.

Users are poor at articulating what they want, and IT people see this as an opportunity to increase the complexity of the solution. The user asks for a "mode of transportation". The IT department deliver a Ferrari - the user needs a bicycle.

Information technology departments and the IT industry have little concept of public relations. They have allowed their reputation to become irrevocably and universally tarnished.

Information technology is too important to business and society to be in such bad shape. We need to get to a point where the term IT becomes associated more with innovation and value than risk and disappointment. Even professionalism would be a step in the right direction.

Users are Generally Suspicious of IT People

And the converse is generally true as well. Suspicion is underpinned by a lack of trust. I believe that as an industry we need to strive towards becoming trusted advisers, where our "customers" actually value our advice.

Very few technologists see their role in a service delivery context. The system administrator focuses on keeping the server running, the programmer is preoccupied with producing software in line with the constraints of the project plan. Whilst both of these objectives will no doubt be of benefit to the users, the emphasis on the technology suggests a "disconnect" between the technologists and the business imperatives. Thus the technologists are perceived as not interested in the business and thus not really part of "the team".

The concept of the IT department has done nothing to dispel this feeling. Occupying a different floor is bad enough, but being in a separate building or separate country is not the best way to forge deep and mutually beneficial relationships. The build up in enmity in the user community towards the IT department ultimately causes the technologists to reciprocate, which leads to a downward spiral in trust.

The emergence of roles such as systems analyst and business analyst is in many respects a "sticking plaster" solution to get around the low mutual trust levels between technologists and users. Their role involves traipsing the "demilitarised zone" between the users and the technologists.

The users do have more than a little justification for feeling this way. I have already mentioned the IT industry's generally poor record of delivery. But if we go back to the 1970s and 1980s, when mainframes ruled the Earth, printing a file was no trivial exercise. It involved submitting a "print job" to the IT department who would endeavour to give you the printout in 24 hours, but only if you spelt print correctly and used the correct form. The IT department was then in the "driving seat", and seemed to enjoy their position of power. The arrival of the PC was like a virus as far as the IT department was concerned, and this was a critical turning point in the business-IT department power axis.

Even if many businesses have forgotten about the IT 'service levels' during the mainframe era, they will remember with deep suspicion the Y2K problem, which proved the perfect excuse for the IT department to demand a bigger budget. Suggestions that the business would collapse without this spend, coupled with extensive media exposure, caused senior executives to play safe and not risk a catastrophe. Today, senior executives cannot be sure whether Y2K was a red herring or whether their spend actually averted disaster. This lingering concern still scars the users' perception of the IT department.

But perhaps worst of all was the dotcom frenzy. This is in part because the IT department was actually circumnavigated by the business. Something as funky as the web had to be owned by the marketing department, the head of which became the "new economy" head of IT. When the dotcom investment market ran out of "fools", the subsequent collapse burnt the fingers of many senior executives. Their self-loathing at being caught up in the hype was vented by effectively sending the IT department "to its bedroom" (aka severe budget cut) for several years. Clearly, IT was in the bad books. But whereas this was a justifiable view to have with the mainframe, and a questionable view in respect of Y2K, it was quite unfair to blame the IT department for the great "dotcon". Understandably, today the IT department carries resentment in respect of its unjustified and humiliating punishment

IT is Unmeasurable

Executives are frustrated that they cannot measure whether they are getting good value from their IT investment. They have generally steered away from becoming too involved in anything to do with IT, other than perhaps insisting that it costs too much, to give the impression that they are in control. Sadly, most executives are not. Somewhat like advertising, they know they have to spend money on IT, but cannot pinpoint where the value comes from in their spend. However, they can sense value in that, where relevant, no advertising leads to plummeting in sales.

Eliminating IT spend would have serious implications. No email, for starters (though that might lead to productivity improvements as a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470018534
• ISBN 13: 9780470018538
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 316
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland