2004

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From Business Strategy to IT Action: Right Decisions for a Better Bottom Line

From Business Strategy to IT Action gives companies of all sizes the tools to effectively link IT to business strategy and produce effective, actionable strategies for bottom-line results. The authors present CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and IT managers with a powerful and accessible resource packed with such useful material as the Strategy-to-Bottom-Line Value Chain, which integrates the management practices relating to planning, prioritization, alignment, and assessing a company’s entire IT budget; methods for using IT Impact Management to establish IT culture and performance models for the business/IT connection; the IT Improvement Zone, which quickly identifies where a company can focus its energies for maximum results, etc.

IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results

Seventy percent of all IT projects fail – and scores of books have attempted to help firms measure and manage IT systems and processes better in order to turn this figure around. In this book, IT experts Peter D. Weill and Jeanne W. Ross argue that the real reason IT fails to deliver value is that companies have no formal system in place for guiding and monitoring IT decisions. Their research shows that firms with explicit IT governance systems have twice the profit of firms with poor governance, given the same strategic objectives. Just as corporate governance systems aim to ensure quality decisions about corporate assets, the authors show, companies need IT governance systems to ensure that IT investments are made wisely and effectively.

Lightweight Enterprise Architectures

The author developed Lightweight Enterprise Architecture (LEA) to enable a quick alignment of technology to business strategy. LEA’s simple and effective framework makes it useful to a wide audience of users throughout an enterprise, coordinating resources for business requirements and facilitating optimal adoption of technology. Lightweight Enterprise Architectures provides a methodology and philosophy that organizations can easily adopt, resulting in immediate value-add without the pitfalls of traditional architectural styles. This systematic approach uses the right balance of tools and techniques to help an enterprise successfully develop its architecture. The first section of the text focuses on how enterprises deploy architecture and how architecture is an evolving discipline. The second section introduces LEA, detailing a structure that supports architecture and benefits all stakeholders. The book concludes by explaining the approach needed to put the framework into practice, analyzing deployment issues and how the architecture is involved throughout the lifecycle of technology projects and systems. This innovative resource tool provides you with a simpler, easily executable architecture, the ability to embrace a complex environment, and a framework to measure and control technology at the enterprise level.

Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices

This book spells out guidelines and strategies for successfully using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in large-scale projects. SOA represents the latest paradigm in distributed computing and middleware development. However,SOA is not a revolution, but rather an evolution in software architecture. SOA is a collection of best practice software construction principles accompanied by proven methodologies in development and project management. This book is unique in that it offers a pragmatic approach to the topic. The authors borrow from their more than forty years of collective enterprise experience, and offer a frank discussion of the challenges associated with adopting SOA. They also help readers ensure that their organization does not become too closely tied to a specific technology. The result is a detailed introduction to the topic and an architectural blueprint for implementing SOA.

IT Governance: A Pocket Guide Based on COBIT

CIOs and IT managers will improve their organization’s performance with this look at security management and the security-based COBIT. Informed by common ISO quality and security standards, ITIL, the Common Scoreboard, and COBIT, the accepted standard for good IT security and control practices, this reference provides a succinct framework for IT management.

IT Architecture Toolkit

Enterprise IT architecture made practical — finally! There’s only one way to maximize legacy infrastructure while integrating new partners, technologies, applications, and data streams: begin with a coherent enterprise architecture. But most approaches to enterprise architecture have been far too complex and theoretical–until now. IT Architecture Toolkit is a breakthrough: a practical, simple, rapid, and complete approach to delivering on the promise of enterprise architecture. Jane Carbone’s approach has been proven in mid-market and Fortune 500 enterprises alike. Step by step, Carbone shows how to integrate business, architecture, implementation, and all key outputs: for data, applications, technology, and people. Whether you’re an IT leader, architect, planner, or analyst, you’ll learn how to create strong, auditable links with business drivers; model your architecture simply, easily, and quickly; translate your models to real, manageable projects; define the value proposition for architecture and establish realistic metrics; achieve buy-in throughout your organization; and manage the soft aspects of your architecture initiative, including processes, roles, responsibilities, and organizational structure. Carbone provides a soup to nuts collection of methods and examples. Using her exercises, you will construct a complete draft architecture for your own business: one that will handle change, opportunity, growth, mergers, downsizing, whatever comes your way.