CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value With Information Technology

Very useful book, it gives you some great insight into IT governance, which is very important in todays world.

Generally, I liked the book "CIO Best Practices". I believe that it contained a lot of useful information for employees in the IT field whether they are CIOs or new employees in the industry. Many IT departments lose focus of the fact that their purpose is to support the company's mission and get sidetracked by the wow factor of technology and end up pursuing change for change sake. "CIO Best Practices" has many useful guidelines for aligning the IT department with the overall corporate strategy. I worked in IT and speak from experience. Of particular use to the Chief Information Officer were concepts on how to make sure that all your efforts are spent to ensure you deliver value-added solutions to the firm that ensure not only the companies existence but also, possibly, competitive advantage. Some of the practices mentioned included focusing on providing deliverables in 3-6 month intervals, building on existing technology, avoiding projects that are beyond the capability of the company to support, proving ROI on projects before undertaking them so as to avoid ad hoc projects, and many other often overlooked IT principles. Chapter 3, "A Strategically Focused, Tactically Agile IT Organization" was insightful and covered useful IT tools such as the Boyd Cycle, Six Sigma, and a Define, Design, Build model. Together these tools form a continual process of sensing opportunities, establishing and enacting a plan to utilize the opportunity, and means of improving upon processes. By far this was the most enjoyable chapter of the book and I believe that these practices would be useful to many other industries and not only Information Technology. The chapter on Outsourcing was also interesting to me. Even though outsourcing has been around for a while I had not given much thought to the practicality of geographical location to help facilitate designing software during people's normal working hours in one part of the world and having it tested in another part of the world during those individuals' normal working hours. We often conceptualize a continuously operating business but we tend to think of the graveyard shift when we do. Overall the book was not too difficult to read, although I found the writing style of Chapter 4 unstimulating. Reading this book was assigned as part of an accounting assignment and I do believe it would help an accountant better understand the job of a CIO.

I expected some depth in the subject but the book provides overview on broad range of topics that senior leaders in IT and in general should also consider apart from strategic alignment.

As an accounting student without much IT experience, the book was a very difficult read at times. Considering that it was written for chief information officers, however, I think the authors actually explained the concepts very clearly, without getting overly technical. The first chapter gives a good procedure for aligning the IT department's goals with those of the firm. It also gives guidelines for effective project management. Chapter two is probably the most difficult for someone with very little IT experience to grasp. It explains enterprise architecture and its link to corporate governance. The third chapter was my personal favorite. It explains how to create an agile IT department using three "agility loops" with supporting processes. These procedures allow the firm to stay strategically focused while creating new processes and improving existing processes. I didn't really care for chapter four, which describes strategy mapping and explains how to use activity-based-costing as a tool for implementing strategic IT finance. I found the fifth chapter more interesting as it defines the balanced scorecard and explains how to apply it to the IT department. Chapter six gives an interesting explanation of the need to place a value on customers and details the procedures and formulas needed to do so. Chapter seven gives reasons why a firm should consider outsourcing and outlines a plan for outsourcing once the decision to do so has been made. The final chapter describes how to measure the ROI of an IT project and recommends managing a group of projects as you would an investment portfolio. Overall, the book seems well written and I would recommend it for CIOs and others who are interested in IT management.

Very difficult read. Written by someone who works with SAP. Would only recommend if you have a familiarity with SAP concepts.

A very good overview of various core issues that senior IT leaders (not just CIO's) face and how they can been approached. This covers such things as governance, performance, customer value, outsourcing, and ROI to name a few areas.The book's title may lead one to believe that this is aimed solely at CIO's, but as mentioned above it covers topics that are very germane to all levels of IT leadership. In fact I would contend that this book is a smart read for any level of IT. Even if you are not looking to get into management, understanding the challenges and mindsets of your department's managers can only help you better achieve your own project ideas and goals.My only complaint with this book revolves around the chapter on customer value. Having worked in this area of IT earlier in my career for a number of years, I did feel close to this material. That said and this chapter was far too granular for a book on best practices. It even goes so far as to offer up very detailed and complicated formulas for figuring out customer life-time value. While this information is important, it is much better found in more specific texts covering such things as marketing database practices, etc. The level of detail in this chapter was simply too much and quite out of place compared to the other chapters.Overall a well written and interesting read that I certainly recommend.

this book is very informative and helpful. Even when I finish my class, I can still see myself reading this book and learning more about the role and task that CIOs perform.

Waste of Time & Money for experience CIO. All Basic & introductory