JT on EDM

I recently finished Ade McCormack’s book, The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. The book is aimed at a fairly high-level audience and makes a case for better integration, or “entwinement”, of technology into businesses. Ade can come across somewhat opinionated but he gives you fair warning of this right up front and he has clearly put his ideas into practice enough to feel confident in them.
Ade’s premise is that IT is often viewed through a cost-focus lens or with a view to assigning blame for problems. As such, its ability to positively impact business is limited and IT can seem to be an immature business function. In particular it can be hard to assign value to IT so as to correctly manage investments in IT. Ade lays makes his case, details his process and then wraps up with a nice “to do” list at the end. The 7 steps in his model (in order of adoption) are:

1. Strategy Entwinement
2. Process Entwinement
3. People Entwinement
4. Technology Management
5. Service Management
6. Circulation Management
7. Value Management

Ade’s perspective is that these must be addressed in order and that each builds on the previous. There is lots of good stuff in the book and he lays out each chapter consistently. He is clearly trying to make each chapter reach coherently stand-alone, and he succeeds, but it gets a little repetitive if you read it quickly end to end. Each chapter also has some comments on the importance of the concepts written by external experts and colleagues of Ade’s, which adds some nice color.

You can read, and edit, the full review on the Wiki here.