......
If you:
- are tired of the increasingly unintelligible hype around corporate IT
- need to get your feet on the ground about how to apply IT for creating business value
- want to understand business intelligence for what it can really do for your organization (as opposed to what the product vendors tell you)
then read this book.
I've been in the software industry for twenty years, and this is one of those rare, honest books that speaks from long experience and with a welcome disregard for technical faddism and ivory tower theory.
This book is needed because the idea of "information at your fingertips" at most companies is still just that: only an idea. Instead, most organizations still operate inefficiently and clumsily from "islands" of information scattered about in everything from spreadsheets to CRM systems to mainframe COBOL programs whose authors have long since retired.
Even companies that have spents millions of dollars to correct this state of affairs have failed. Why?
This book is about making information available across the board, why you would want to, and how to give your technology of choice "traction" and an impact on the bottom line.
This is done from two perspectives: the technical and the human side.
The author is refreshingly frank in describing corporate IT disasters, and does an excellent job of exposing the human side of where they go wrong down in the trenches. Anyone who has been anywhere near an overbudget, underperforming, or ultimately worthless IT project (this should include most people in corporate IT by now) will read with a smile of recognition. Others should read before you spend: there is a lot of money and heartache to be saved. By demonstrating in everyday language that the hardest part to manage is human expectations, Biere performs a real service to the industry that is usually neglected, and gives managers, end users, and even vendors much insight on where to be proactive.
But this is not a collection of anecdotes. CIOs, CEOs, IT professionals, and beginners will gain a lot from the industry retrospectives, overviews of categories of tools, and the workbook approach for grasping the human side and the technical side at once. The author provides thinking and homework that MUST be done before even considering an expenditure, and asks the questions that even the most expensive consultants won't ask for you.
Because the author is with IBM, you might expect the book to promote IBM products. Not so. Mr. Biere manages to name almost no products, and yet covers the tools available comprehensively.
And college computer science professors: put this book in your curricula -- give your students a healthy dose of the "real world" before sending them out into it.
Well done, Biere.
