Peter A. High

In the years following this 2009 book, the central place of information technology (IT) in the business world has only become recognized more and more. The COVID pandemic accelerated trends whereby IT plays a critical role in global business culture. Peter High’s book fixed the paradigm for how successful IT might be leveraged for business success. Almost 15 years later, the question then becomes: Is it still relevant? Yes, I argue. This classic helps us understand the forces that brought us to where we are today. That understanding will only help businesses understand how to better posture themselves for tomorrow.

Five explicit principles undergird this book: Attracting IT talent, maintaining an IT infrastructure, effectively managing projects, ensuring internal partnerships between IT and the business, and developing external collaborations. Though some of the examples have changed, this general structure still conveys how to lead a successful IT business. Addressing today’s challenges, which are different than those in this book, requires understanding and appreciating this framework first. Besides grasping it by experience within a world-class IT department, how better to distill that knowledge than by reading the book that set it all into motion?

For each topic/principle, High summarizes its value, extracts several sub-principles that ensure an effective implementation, and describes dozens of metrics that can measure its performance. High especially underscored the importance of the right metrics to me… How can we ascertain success without measuring it in the first place? And if the wrong measurements are made, won’t our “successes” become malformed? Applying these questions to my work keep me working to build a more effective tomorrow for my organization.

Present-day IT and business leaders comprise an obvious audience for this book. However, businesspeople who deal with IT or IT workers who deal with the business can also benefit significantly. Contemporary businesses live or die off of effective deployment of IT into business solutions. Workers who can talk both languages can accelerate their careers as they span the divide.

High’s later books seem to address problems that emerge from this paradigm. Some may choose to engage them rather than this one. Not me. I think crystallizing this framework is a more important first step than figuring out how to extrapolate from it how to become more effective, nimble, and agile. This book is the one to read from him; let other books lead on the emerging topics. It remains on my list of classics for understanding IT business success.… (más)