The Alignment Effect: How to Get Real Business Value Out of Technology

Author: Faisal Hoque List Price: $26.95 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0130449393 Publisher: Financial Times Prentice Hall (23 August, 2002) Edition: Hardcover Sales Rank: 190,434 Average Customer Rating: 3.38 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

If I'd gained a sense of how to fix things, I'd give the book 3 or 4 stars. Unfortunately, I didn't get any sense of how to change things. The lack of suggestions to drive change is a shortcoming and left me empty and feeling partly like I wasted my time.

I liked Sarv Devaraj's book on the IT payoff much better. It is dry and harder to read. On the plus side, it gives me an idea of what to measure and change first.

I get the feeling Faisal Hoque thinks IT departments area stupd. They should be closely monitored by business leaders at all times. I agree.

The book gives you a good sense of issues. It falls short on presenting solutions.

It nicely covers IT governance. It is a good intro or refresher for governance and hits the right points for me.

The highly anecdotal chapters are nicely written and include cameo references from a variety of credible people. Unfortunately, the result is an informal hodgepodge of IT assessments and claims that lead to uncharted waters, which would likely lead to results more pernicious than the problem.

There are many books that integrate portfolio management, project management, and IT planning with a dose of knowledge management and collaboration that help accomplish the claimed results without entering the over-simplified world that this book presents.

My comments on each major section:

Section 1 -- A wordy regurgitation of the fact that IT doesn't always get everything right the first time. This is clearly an attempt to build credibility, but fails to me, since this problem has been well known since the 70s.

Section 2 -- A totally informal section, purporting to be "principles," yet failing to deliver any real framework for understanding or action. It doesn't even clarify or regurgitate, I'm not sure where this stuff comes from. I don't sense any deep understanding of IT or its issues. It reads well, but says nothing useful.

Section 3 -- This tries to turn the essence of section 2, whatever that could be, into action, apparently to make the book a practical guide. It tries to give an enlightened holistic sounding end-to-end view, and fails, leaving only something more like the cuttings from Pulp Fiction or Memento. The coverage of business models is more like how to organize a simple table of contents and document your business model. The real point is business model documentation, not definition. The book shows know understanding of a "business model" in any sense from marketing through finance. The discussion of process optimization is thin and useless, hundreds of books are available that cover process design and implementation quite well -- skip this section. The conversion of all this into "automation" goes into a toddler-like realm of simplicity, and not in the positive senses that might connote.

Section 4 -- On to Governance, another hot buzzword. Loosely speaking, this section tries to build on the earlier sections to talk to modern governance issues. This is the dangerous section. There is nothing to base this section on, the book isn't a new framework or idea, not even a good regurgitation of present knowledge. The governance section does elucidate goals of governance reasonably, but suggests a governance approach that will be as unresponsive to real technology issues as the absolute worst of IT departments might be to business issues. At best, this section would help swing the pendulum the other way, though it would more likely just cut it off.

Sadly, the book has good style, presentation, and writing, but lacks useful or coherent content. The few reasonable ideas that appear are endlessly repeated, suggesting the author doesn't believe the reader gets it the first five times. More likely, the author has nothing else to say.

The book is timely, but misses the mark. There are many solid books in this arena that are based in workable practices, yet remain high accessible to a broad audience. This book seems highly rushed to me, like the author had an idea and the book came out 30 days later. Somehow the style is good, but the content lacks research or forethought.

Professor Roger P. Ellenhurst
California University Coalition

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