New Excerpt Up - from The IT Value Stack

There's a new excerpt up on our Excerpts blog: the introduction to The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership by Ade McCormack. From the inside flap: "Successful IT value realisation is a cloudy subject. This in part contributes to the overall dissatisfaction many organisations have with IT. This book tackles the subject of IT value realisation head on. Most importantly it provides a model to help CIOs and business leaders maximise the return on their IT investment." Here are the author's reasons for writing a book about IT Leadership:

Introduction: What's IT All About?

"Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together."
Jesse Jackson, US Civil Rights Leader

Introduction

Welcome to The IT Value Stack - A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. Before we get into the content proper I have provided some insights into why I have written this book. This opening chapter also details the book's structure.

I have my Reasons

Having worked in the IT sector for more than two decades, I have made a number of observations that are in many ways interrelated:

• The IT industry has a poor delivery record.
• Business people do not know what IT people are talking about. And this doesn't seem to bother IT people.
• Users are generally suspicious of IT people.
• Executives are frustrated that they cannot measure whether they are getting good value from their IT investment.
• There is a perception that all problems involving IT are ipso facto the fault of the IT department.
• The IT industry suffers from low self-esteem.
• Many businesses do not know what business they are in. I will dwell on these in the next chapter.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007824.html