Showing posts with label managers guides to computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label managers guides to computing. Show all posts

Information Technology for Management: Improving Performance in the Digital Economy Review

Information Technology for Management: Improving Performance in the Digital Economy
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Information Technology for Management: Improving Performance in the Digital Economy ReviewIn short, this book does not teach about management. It hardly teaches anything useful about I.T. and it is not a quality resource for a graduate-level class.
Yes, the content, is all from very current sources. It was very impressive to see this textbook handled in a Fall '09 class when its published date is 2010. However, all that goes aside when reading the book's content. It takes very high-level definitions of commonly-known applications and somehow makes a subject matter out of them. For example, one of the questions in chapter 7 asks to "define the Wi-Fi revolution." I doubt that this buzzwordy term, along with the thousands of other buzzwords that comprise the bulk of subject matter in this book, was important for me to know in a management role. Throughout the book, they drop all kinds of odd abbreviations. In chapter 5, they refer to "EC", which is not defined anywhere in that or any of the previous chapters, and isn't clearly described until chapter 6, which is all about "E-commerce". Lots of e-this and e-that terms are peppered across the boldly-colored pages.
Every other page has something that could be considered a "sidebar" - a large sub-article that is relative to the content of that section - that ends up consuming the entire page. This breaks up the continuity of the book when trying to read through. I will go through a plain white page with black text, see the paragraph wrap in mid-sentence, turn the page expecting to see the rest of the paragraph, and then the page is blue with a whole separate article in a different font. I understand that textbooks do this from time-to-time to add in knowledge relevant to the content, but this happens with the turn of *every* page. The sidebars themselves are discontinuous, all exploding in different shades of pink, blue, or green.
Many of the graphics drawn in the book make no sense. The section on Data Visualisation tells us that graphics are supposed to convey knowledge as drawn from a data source so the information can be understood easily (e.g., a graph). The artists of this book must not have read that chapter.
I'm halfway through the book now and am about to take my midterm this Sunday. Having read half a textbook on IT Management, I haven't read one bit about PMP certification, which is a global standard for project managers. I'm disappointed and will certainly inform my school of this, but I wanted to inform any potential institutions that this textbook is full of fluff and needn't be used.
Information Technology for Management: Improving Performance in the Digital Economy OverviewInformation technology has changed how businesses operate and succeed in today's global economy. Organizations can now use IT to transform themselves and achieve a tremendous competitive advantage. Information Technology for Management: Transforming Organizations in the Digital Economy, Seventh Edition highlights how this new technology is changing the current business environment and what effect it has on today's students. The text addresses the major principles of MIS in order to prepare managers to understand the role of information technology in the digital economy. Revised and updated for a junior or senior level MIS or MBA course, this title will give students what they need to succeed in the emerging digital economy.

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The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It Review

The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It
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The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It ReviewI usually don't read business books, but I was intrigued by the the subject of this book. Who wouldn't want to know about how Google achieved market domination, became one of the largest companies on the planet, and has vowed to "don't be evil?" (Do other companies say, we won't be evil unless it suits our purposes?)
The book was written by Bernard Girard, a French management consultant who has been observing the Google "phenomenon" for years.
It is divided into an introduction, and three sections. The sections talk about current management, putting users first, and sustainability of the current model. Business history of rife with stories of companies that dominated their market niche, but weren't able to sustain their positions. General Motors is the current example that comes to mind, but there are many.
I work in the medical area, and have run or been involved in small medical businesses for many years. I found the descriptions of the Google way to mesh with what I've have found to work in small businesses of 10 to 20 employees. I was surprised to learn that general management theory subscribes to a different set of rules for larger business. Google hasn't followed many of these bromides.
Here are the author's main points about the current Google business model:
There is a triumvirate management. This provides checks and balances, and a wider, more democratic information flow so that decisions are made on the basis of more information. It doesn't allow one person to go off on a personal tangent and take the company with him.
Every effort is made to recruit the most qualified people, particularly people with graduate degrees.
Google allows employees to spend 20% of their time on a project not approved by the company. They "trust" the employee to do something good for Google with this time, but leave much of the decision making to the employee. I would call this a form of employee empowerment.
Peer review is encouraged (democratization of the work force)
Encourage innovation. Many examples of concrete ways to implement this are given in the chapter.
Be like a Swiss Army knife. Try to make a complete tool set for most jobs that internet savvy folks will pursue.
Measure everything. Development mathematical formulas that model the real activity of the business, and monitor their outcomes on a regular basis.
Keep teams small. This improves intra-team communication, and is more efficient.
Create tools that allow teams and divisions to easily communicate (think blogs, twitter-like apps, etc.)
Learn to use simple tools in concert to accomplish big tasks (think thousands of linux blade servers running custom software to accurately model the internet, and use that model for very quick and accurate searches)The rest of the book talks about more intangible issues, making the users first, various issues related to how the internet functions, copyright issues, sustainability of the enterprise in its current form, and others.
People who run small businesses will recognize most of these principles, and in fact already have implemented many of them. I suspect that Sergey Brin and Larry Page intuitively knew what would work best with the bright people they planned to hire for their company. They created a company that in many ways modeled a graduate school environment. Google has been successful in part because it has empowered (given responsibility to) its employees, creates tools that are used by both employees and customers, and has kept bureaucracy to a minimum. If only our government could learn the same lesson.
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