Book Recommendations from EVA Winners


Sun, February 15, 2004

CIO — In honor of this issue’s CIO Enterprise Value Awards, we’ve compiled a member-recommended list of books and articles on running world-class IT. Reading a couple of these just might propel you into the winner’s circle next year.

Good to Great, by Jim Collins

"An excellent guide for building a great IT organization."

-Evan Stewart, CIO, B/E Aerospace

The Servant, by James C. Hunter

This book "makes you analyze what is important in leading the IT organization."

-Evan Stewart, CIO, B/E Aerospace

Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, by Bob Rotella with Bob Cullen

"Though it is not an IT book, it contains insightful information that can be applied to IT. It focuses on the ’vision thing’?the premise that you need to set difficult tasks to achieve goals and then dedicate yourself to getting there, and you need to recognize that there will be setbacks. In the end, IT is not a process of perfect."

-James M. Riis, CIO,BayView Financial Trading Group

"Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?" by William Oncken and Donald L. Wass, Harvard Business Review, February 2000

"A failure to delegate is a huge time-waster for IT leaders, and it’s a hard skill to learn for someone with a technical background. ’Management Time’ is an absolutely fabulous article on the subject."

-Paul Ingevaldson, SVP of International and Technology, Ace Hardware

The Deadline, by Tom DeMarco

"For a little light reading, try this novel about project management."

Gene Elias, VP of IT, Quiksilver

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.
For this white paper, IDC performed an in-depth analysis of the business value of VMware View, defined as the expected ROI associated with the use of the solution as a platform for the targeted deployment of a virtual desktop infrastructure.
This paper explains virtualization, its benefits for mid-sized business and how IBM's virtualization strategy can help these companies reduce costs, improve services and simplify management.
Forrester Research makes recommendations on best practices to optimize branch virtualization and consolidation initiatives. See how a "thin" branch architecture, with key servers, services and applications in the data center that relies on a high-performing WAN connection, can offer the greatest efficiencies.
When trying to achieve continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations, organizations need to replace traditional processes with a new best practice approach and new innovative technology, such as that provided by IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager.
IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager helps organizations automatically manage patches for multiple operating systems and applications across hundreds of thousands of endpoints regardless of location, connection type or status.  
Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.
VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment
IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.
Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.
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