Overview

This is a book about transforming the business value of IT. It is about identifying what is relatively important in IT product and service delivery (and doing it extremely well) and what is relatively unimportant (and doing it acceptably well). It is, in short, about jam delivery today, the jam in this case being value .

A significant amount of research went into this book but I sincerely hope that that is not readily evident because my message is founded on practical experience, not pseudo-academic theory. So, trust me, you won t find a single footnote or reference clogging up the text of this book! This book isn t science, it s personal. I generally don t have much patience with the theories of the management sciences , although I confess that I have cherry-picked a few bits of management theory that did actually seem to correlate reality as I have experienced it. This book is not even based on conventional wisdom because, as I intend to show, conventional wisdom is often spouted by those with an agenda (namely, to sell you something) and, anyway, is often based on assumptions that do not bear commercial scrutiny. Therefore my attitude to the inclusion of advice in this book has been that if it will make a real (commercial) difference in the real (commercial) world, it s in; if it doesn t, it s out. My goal is to be...