Optimizing and Assessing Information Technology: Improving Business Project Execution

Preface

This book is a guide—its purpose is to aid you in optimizing and assessing information technology (IT). Optimizing and Assessing Information Technology: Improving Business Project Execution is designed to be both easy to use and immediately useful. Put simply, this book is focused on improving business project execution through effective IT optimization and assessment.

I wrote this book based on, among other things, my experience working across the field of IT at companies both small and large, ranging from start-up enterprises on one extreme, to General Electric (GE) and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, at the other extreme.

IT is a field and a discipline with a variety of meanings and interpretations. The working definition of IT that I will use for this book comes from the Information Technology Associations of America and is, “the study, design, development, application, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.”1

This book is focused on both assessing and optimizing IT. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to optimize something is to make it as “effective or functional as possible,” and to assess something is to “determine its importance or value.”

As a guide, this book offers a framework for optimizing and assessing IT. It does not focus in on specific technologies per se—given the rapid and increasing pace of technical change across the world today, any such focus is ...