From
Business Strategy to IT Action
will be published by John Wiley and Sons and will
be available to the general public in February, 2004. To reserve your copy,
request sample chapters, or for any other comments or questions you may
have, please email us at
rightdecisions@beta-books.com.
Getting the Most from the IT Spend
This book is based on a very simple idea: a company
should only spend money on IT that directly supports its business strategy
and its operational effectiveness, and should not spend money on IT that
doesn’t. The management team can control IT budgets and investments and
at the same time improve IT’s bottom-line impact by consistently and
persistently selecting the best IT investments, and eliminating
underperforming existing IT activities. We refer to this as moving into
the
IT Improvement Zone. This book shows how to do this.
From Business Strategy to
IT Action presents an
integrated approach to controlling IT budgets and getting the biggest bang
for the IT buck. Starting with a coordinated business/IT strategic planning
process and continuing through to business/IT performance measurement, the
authors present a suite of tools for understanding, managing, and
controlling the entire IT spend, all aimed toward producing exactly the
right IT actions for the organization.
The central theme of the book is the Strategy-to-Bottom-Line Value Chain, a
framework for organizing the processes that move a company from business
strategy to the right IT decisions. The Value Chain integrates 5 practices
that a company can use to get the most bottom-line impact from IT
activities, including:
To support these practices, the authors present robust Portfolio Management and Culture Management practices, all focused on making IT produce measurable bottom-line impact. Finally, all of these are tied together with the Business Value Maturity Model, a tool for assessing the readiness of the organization to use IT most effectively for the business.