A consistently clear and notably thorough guide to IT strategy that should be on every chief information officer’s desk.
A manual presents a comprehensive strategy that situates information technology within the broader context of the business it serves.
According to Maholic (Business Cases That Mean Business, 2013), this is simultaneously a thrilling and harrowing time to be a chief information officer in charge of IT strategy since the executive can be both “the beneficiary and besieged warrior of rapidly advancing technology.” A wide-ranging strategy is absolutely necessary, but a universally effective one that accommodates all circumstances doesn’t exist—“different current states, different desired future states and different organizational structures” render that impossible in principle. Instead, the author articulates with astonishingly impressive thoroughness and clarity the general framework within which such a scheme should be constructed. Maholic argues that an IT division’s purpose is to serve the greater mission of the organization that houses it, and so a CIO must think like a CEO, always understanding technology in light of the demands of business. The author uses an acronym to capture this orientation, SEAR, which represents the four pillars of any business strategy: sales, expenses, assets, and risks. “The SEAR imperative states that every proposal for significant, material projects or programs must define success by showing how the proposed initiative increases sales, reduces expenses, optimizes assets or mitigates risk,” Maholic asserts. That bottom-line orientation undergirds the overall IT scheme, which the author envisions as a three-dimensional cube, with its primary parts Foundations; Deliberations regarding technical, philosophical, and practical concerns; and Vexations, the “forces opposing your strategy.” Maholic has twice served as a CIO at different organizations and has worked for years as a management consultant, a depth of experience that radiates from this analytically rigorous and encyclopedic study. The book is written from the perspective of a manager of an IT division versus a technologist. One of the most strikingly original aspects of the work is the priority assigned to management philosophy over technology: “Technology is among the least critical aspects in driving the success of an IT Strategy. Technology is certainly relevant and holds a central place in the strategy. But the success of your IT Strategy is more dependent on the other Deliberation considerations than it is on technology.” Maholic doesn’t just provide philosophically broad counsel—he also furnishes helpfully detailed, immediately actionable instructions regarding a dizzying array of subjects, often accompanied by diagrams. Unfortunately, the volume can lose focus, and as a result it’s bloated to well over 500 pages—he could have dispensed with establishing analogies between IT strategy and the machinations of chess and military planning. But his prose is consistently accessible and mercifully unburdened by gratuitously technical, business, or IT jargon. And besides the work’s expansive scope, its principal strength is the relentless way it emphasizes the significance of “value velocity,” or the urgent need for a CIO to deliver measurable business results in a timely fashion. Maholic’s contribution is a standout in a crowded field and should become the authoritative source on the subject.
A consistently clear and notably thorough guide to IT strategy that should be on every chief information officer’s desk.Pub Date: May 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-798324-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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