All About Alignment

Computerworld - Winning the 3-Legged Race: When Business and Technology Run Together, by Faisal Hoque, V. Sambamurthy, Robert Zmud, Tom Trainer and Carl Wilson (Prentice Hall, 256 pages, $27.99).

If you want a book that is focused on the alignment between IT and business, look no further. The five authors, along with several contributing authors, draw an analogy to a three-legged race. IT and business are tied together, and their goal is to cooperate with each other and coordinate their "third leg," which can be viewed as an amalgam of strategy, governance, business processes, budgeting, risk management, business partners and the external marketplace.

The authors, who include a mix of academics and CIOs, such as PepsiCo Inc.'s Tom Trainer and Marriott International Inc.'s Carl Wilson, do a credible job of describing the evolution of business technology management and providing anecdotes of real-world successes and failures from which readers can learn. The book is masterfully sprinkled with flow charts, diagrams, text boxes, mini case studies and tips from leading experts, such as F. Warren McFarlan of Harvard Business School, and MetLife Inc. CIO Steven Sheinheit. A must-read for today's IT executive.

Get Back in the Box: Innovation From the Inside Out, by Douglas Rushkoff (HarperCollins, 336 pages, $23.95).

I've always despised cliches and prefabricated expressions in business. And "think outside the box" is right at the top (or is it the bottom?) of the heap.

That's certainly one of the reasons why Rushkoff's book appealed to me. But as I began paging through it, I realized that there's a lot more to this volume than my personal disdain for marketingspeak.

Rushkoff contends that business managers all too frequently embrace change and shift the strategic direction of their companies in a mad rush to remain competitive and innovative. Instead, he recommends that corporate executives think "inside the box" in order to stay true to their companies' core competencies and best serve their customers.

Unlike cookie-cutter business-advice books that are filled with mini case studies of customer successes to back up the author's premise, Get Back in the Box intersperses historical examples of corporate blunders and accomplishments that are designed to provoke introspection.

For instance, Rushkoff points to how James Dyson, the inventor of the high-end Dyson vacuum cleaner, ignored suggestions from focus groups prior to the product's launch that consumers would be disgusted by having to see the filth that piles up in the machine's transparent collection bin. Instead, he followed his instincts that such a visual "would give people a certain sense of satisfaction after they vacuumed." The feature became a great selling point.