The Technology Garden Cultivating Sustainable IT-Business Alignment

"This book could make the difference between competitive success or failure" -Miko Matsumura, Chair, OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee "A significant addition to the Enterprise Architect's bookshelf" -Rupert Brown, Principal Architect, Merrill Lunch Global Business Technology EMEA Many IT deployments fall short of delivering value to the business that pay for them. On top of this, the combined forces of rapid business change and technological innovation frequently outpace the ability of IT organisations to make sense of their implications. With business activity and IT now so intimately intertwined, organizations urgently need a framework which allows them to align IT capabilities with business strategies and priorities in a way that is sustainable. A team of IT-expert authors with more than 80 years' combined experience have interviewed dozens of CIOs, IT Directors and other senior technical and business decision makers to find out what works and what doesn't. The result is a handbook for organizations of all sizes that want to improve the value of their IT investments, thus enabling their IT capabilities to play a more pivotal business role. Written in plain English that does not descend into technical detail, The Technology Garden provides practical advice for organisations looking to achieve sustainable IT-business alignment. To do so, it defines: Six key principles - a distillation of best practice that readers can apply directly to the domain of IT-business alignment A framework for this application - a pragmatic roadmap for the application of the principles Adoption guidelines - a set of self-assessment checklists that readers can use to understand where they are on the IT-business alignment roadmap and how to progress. With groundbreaking research and proven approaches, this blueprint enables readers to understand what is at the heart of IT-business alignment. Combining IT research, analysis and real-world insight, The Technology Garden is the ultimate no-nonsense guide.

Jon Collins has nearly 20 years of experience in IT. Jon has worked as an industry analyst for over 7 years, for companies including Quocirca, Bloor Research and IDC. He has acted as an advisor to leading vendors including Cisco, EMC, IBM and Microsoft, and to large IT user organisations in the Government, Telecommunications and Financial Services sectors.

Neil Macehiter is one of the founders of Macehiter Ward-Dutton, an IT advisory firm focused firmly on the challenge of IT-business alignment. He has almost 21 years of experience in the IT industry, having worked in consulting, product and technology strategy roles for vendors.

Dale Vile is the research director of Freeform Dynamics. He specialises in monitoring how IT industry developments map onto practical business needs in the Enterprise and SMB mainstream.

Neil Ward-Dutton is the other founder of Macehiter Ward-Dutton. He has over 15 years of experience in the IT industry - in a mixture of consulting and industry analysis roles. He started his career as a business analyst at ICI, and then spent a number of years as a software engineer working for one of the UK's leading software consultancies at the time, Praxis.