IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology - Tapa blanda

Acerca del autor

Michael Gentle has over 25 years of experience in IT departments, consulting companies and software vendors in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. He brings a refreshingly new angle to an old problem - and directly challenges both IT professionals and business executives to think differently about how to achieve IT success.

www.michaelgentle.com

De la contraportada

IT /Programming /Software Development

"FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE BIRTH OF CORPORATE COMPUTING, IT TODAY IS STILL CHARACTERIZED BY 50-70% PROJECT FAILURE RATES. WHICH IS PRETTY SCARY WHEN YOU COME TO THINK OF IT: EITHER A GOBLIN HAS CAST A SPELL ON A WHOLE PROFESSION – OR THAT PROFESSION IS DOING SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG".

IT Success! challenges the widespread assumption that an IT department is like a building contractor whose project managers, architects and engineers (all construction industry terms&;) are supposed to deliver systems on schedule, within budget and to spec. Michael Gentle explains why this is not possible, and turns conventional wisdom on its head by showing that:

• you cannot define an IT project in terms of contractual budgets and schedules
• anything can change during the life of a project
• what is eventually delivered can never be what is actually needed

He proposes a new model for IT in which the traditional client/ vendor relationship, with its contractual commitments, is replaced by a shared risk/reward partnership geared towards workable results over time. Using real-world examples and a case study, the author walks you through the end-to-end processes of an IT department, covering subjects like demand management, investment planning, agile development and managing production applications.