From Business Strategy to It Action: Right Decisions for a Better Bottom Line - Hardcover

From Business Strategy to IT Action shows how CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs can improve their IT investments, control IT budgets, and get the biggest bang for their IT buck. From a coordinated business/IT strategic planning process to business/IT performance measurement, the authors present a suite of tools for understanding, managing, and controlling the entire IT budget, aimed at producing the right IT actions for the organization.

The central theme of this book is the Strategy-to-Bottom-Line Value Chain, a framework that integrates five practices a company can use to get the right bottom-line results from IT activities: Strategic IT Demand/Supply Planning, Innovation, Prioritization, Alignment, and Performance Measurement. The authors present robust Portfolio Management and Culture Management support practices, all focused on making IT produce measurable bottom-line results. All of these are tied together with the Business Value Maturity Model(TM), a tool for assessing the readiness of an organization to use IT most effectively in its business.

Extending the groundbreaking concepts introduced in Information Economics that promote management's direct involvement in decision-making for IT investment, this book shows how management can actively participate in all activities in the Value Chain. By wrapping a complete planning and management framework around the original concepts of Information Economics, the authors establish a new way for business and IT managers to make the right decisions and get the right results from IT.

Thomas L. Bugnitz is President of The Beta Group. He is a frequent speaker on technology management and an adjunct professor at Washington University.

William B. Walton is a principal with The Beta Group. Prior to joining The Beta Group, he spent seventeen years with Gartner Group, where he developed IT measurement services and associated analytical methods.