I read James Taylor’s review of “The IT Value Stack” back in March and made a note to read the book. I was attracted by the scope of the stack:
1. Strategy Entwinement
2. Process Entwinement
3. People Entwinement
4. Technology Management
5. Service Management
6. Circulation Management
7. Value Management
And I’m very interested in the business value of systems and the processes they enable.
The author, Ade McCormack, was good enough to comment on our blog entry on the Business/IT Alignment gap and that reminded me to read the book.
Well, I just finished it and have to say I was rather disappointed. I think my expectations were too high.
The sweeping generalizations in chapter 1 didn’t get me off to a good start and I quickly realized that Ade and I hadn’t met the same kinds of CIOs. Most of the ones I’ve met (Safeway, Newmont, Goodyear, Aimco, Ryder, GE Advanced Materials, Yale University, Citrix, and so on) are quite business-savvy, sometimes speaking like COOs, who are clearly value visionaries. Likewise CFOs: Mr. McCormack says the CFO “is unlikely to provide any operational or even strategic input into the IT department.” Most of the CFOs I have worked with have a keen understanding of the competitive advantage potential of IT, and are quite involved in the prioritization of strategic systems – especially those that measure, monitor, plan & analyze the business.
I was attracted to his use of the word “entwinement” in the stack, but it turns out that entwinement is really the same thing as bidirectional alignment.
The Process Entwinement section is more about the IT requirements gathering process itself than it is about technology enabling business processes. I was hoping for a process framework or some new thinking on management processes, again, my expectations were too high.
While I appreciate an external perspective on the thoughts expressed in the book, and Mr. McCormack has done an admirable job collecting those from a variety of sources, he lumps them all together at the end of each chapter instead of interspersing them within the text and keeping them close to the arguments he makes. This diminishes the strength of his points.
I was also surprised to see paragraphs duplicated in whole (i.e.: “People Are Expensive” on page 111 reappears on page 120).
And a small nit-pick: he talks about the boardroom and board members as if they had some tactical executive responsibility in a company. This could just be semantics, but the board members I have worked with are quite far removed from day-to-day IT project management decisions.
Finally, there was no mention of how the layers interconnect with one another, no hand-off between or relationship among the layers. I’m not sure why there was a stack to begin with, it’s more of a list.
A better executive-level book for IT value and leadership would be Enterprise Architecture As Strategy by Ross, Weill & Robertson, in my opinion.
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