Business-Focused IT and Service Excellence

This book will still be relevant in 10 years time, despite any shifts in technology, delivery methods or the nature of the business that IT is servicing.

As organisations IT and business processes become ever more integrated and project managers needing to ensure that they have a wide spectrum of understanding, this is a practical book that discusses the issues and gives many answers.

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The title of the book gave me a very dry and “been here before” feeling. However, knowing something about the author, David Miller, I took a chance and spent the money. Having read the book, this is something I can recommend to all programme and project managers who have to deliver IT services.

The first chapter lays the background to the IT industry and how businesses are ever more reliant on it. I particularly enjoyed the section on the need to be agile and managing stakeholders. Areas that are, I believe, still weaknesses in many organisations.

The second chapter starts to get to the meat of the issues with discussion around business awareness, maximising the IT experience for the business and effective communications. The section on compliance and regulatory considerations is still relevant today as it was when the book was written in 2008.

This section of the book also covered IT Governance and techniques for a "Governance Framework" for developing and implementing an appropriate governance model. The health of the organisation's IT is underpinned by addressing all the activities involved and defining business and service provider responsibilities.

Incidentally, I did something similar for Aon in 2007 when I set up a governance framework for their website content (pdf; 2 pages; 95 KB).

The third chapter was perhaps the most interesting to me as it dealt with projects. I especially found the content around measuring stakeholder satisfaction and quantitative and qualitative measures particularly useful.

The remaining chapters covered how IT can drive organisation effectiveness, integrating it into the business planning process and how the public and 'not for profit' sector should use it.

This book illustrates some very powerful techniques like "Defining the Critical Information Set" and Radar Diagrams to look at SWOT analysis of an organisation.

In summary, this is a great read for anyone who will appreciate solid, practical help in gaining an understanding of the business experience, plus in assessing and improving the performance of IT service providers of all kinds. It will still be relevant in 10 years time, despite any shifts in technology, delivery methods, international standards which apply and the nature of the business that IT is servicing.