From Wired to Weird: Books on Fixing IT

Making IT Better: Expanding Information Technology Research to Meet Society's Needs,

In fact, what the researchers do here is ask the right questions about IT and society, without necessarily coming up with any of the answers. This academic metastudy focuses not on IT, but on research about IT, where it's being done and by whom, and how research about IT may improve IT and society as a whole.

The report accomplishes its academic purpose but won't be terribly useful to IT managers in the trenches. If you're looking to go into research, this is the place to start. Otherwise, stick with something more down to earth. —Kevin Fogarty

by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council (National Academy Press, 272 pages, paperback, $34.95). Count on the National Science Foundation, which underwrote the research for this book, to look at the big picture about life and IT, while the rest of the publishing world is focused on how-to tech books and New Economy apologia.

What could be more down to earth than project management? More specifically, what could be more down to earth than The Project Surgeon: A Troubleshooter's Guide to Business Crisis Management, by Boris Hornjak (Project Management Institute, 130 pages, paperback, $34.95). The publicists pitch this one as a hands-on troubleshooting manual for operational managers—and they're not far off.

Although the book isn't specifically about IT, the guidelines that Hornjak lays down can be applied by almost any IT manager who has to regularly put out fires while simultaneously moving forward on several fronts.

Hornjak, a 17-year veteran project manager, covers business recovery in three parts—Emergency Management, Crisis Management and Crisis Prevention.

Emergencies are projects handled quickly, Hornjak writes; they have a beginning, middle and an end and can be metered, guided and analyzed, just like any other project.

Almost more valuable than the prose and the tips are the charts, checklists and examples of the analytics that not only mark a project's progress, but also show when it should be cut loose and when it's already too late to do so.

But if you're not a project manager, don't even open the book; knowing the details on how badly major projects can go wrong will only keep you up at night. —Kevin Fogarty

One of the most puzzling questions facing modern businesses, especially Web-based organizations, is how to decipher whether and when intellectual property needs to be paid for or protected. On the surface, it seems obvious, but the Napster controversy alone demonstrates that it's not.