Book reviews

gossip. This section ends with a chapter on impact of IT on the economic performance
dealing with swarms of failures. of industrial firms, defining criteria for
The book ends with an epilogue on allocation of resources to IT investments,
Zeroeth-Order Measurement that suggests and the measurement of productivity for
four basic steps to achieve it: information workers. It provides useful
advice and innovative approaches for
1. compose a project of well-defined and
research investigations in these areas, and
measurable tasks;
constructive ideas for the design of research
2. create and maintain a public view of
projects. The editors are distinguished
project progress;
scholars who have published and lectured
3. document the requirements about what
extensively in these topics; their expertise
is meant by quality;
enabled them to select the best articles
4. review to measure every result of
from among those contributed, edit them
progress toward quality.
constructively, and organize the chosen ones
‘Zeroeth-order measurement is related to logically. All but two of the 36 authors are
the Zeroeth Law of Software Engineering: academics, and only three reside outside the
USA and Canada. The book might have
If you don’t care about quality,
benefited from a broader international per-
you can achieve any other objective. ’
spective and from having more practitioners,
My conclusion is that if you don’t care about but the list does include many of the best
quality, don’t read this book. If you do care known names in our discipline. To avoid
about quality, read it. listing some of them and not others, I have
chosen not to use any of the authors’ names
References in this review.
Sahir, V, et al. (1991) The Satir Model, Family It is unfortunate, however, that such a
Therapy and Beyond Science and Behavior misleading title was chosen for this other-
Books, Palo Alto, CA wise impressive book. Strategic Information
Weinberg, G M (1992) Quality Software
Technology Management implies that it
Management, Vol 1, Systems Thinking Dorset
House Publishing Company, New York will provide insights for managers in better
ways of managing IT so as to contribute
Clay Sprowls to strategic success, or at least insights
University of California for researchers in developing research
Los Angeles, USA approaches towards better management
methods. The subtitle, Perspectives on
Organizational Growth and Competitive
Advantage, suggests that the articles will
Strategic Information Technology focus on using IT for revenue enhancement
Management: Perspectives on and market share enlargement rather than
Organizational Growth and Competitive for its traditional role of cost cutting. There
Advantage is very little in this volume on those topics.
Rajiv D Banker, Robert J Kauffman and One article discusses the role of IT in
MO Adam Mahmood (eds) responsive systems, and there are numerous
Idea Group Publishing Harrisburg PA brief references to strategy in other articles,
(1993) 704pp $84.95 (+ $12 shipping to UK) but the dominating theme throughout the
ISBN 1 878289 16 0 book is the measurement of business value.
Certainly this is an important issue for MIS
This book contains a wealth of valuable practitioners and researchers, but it is only
information and useful insights for those one component of strategic IT management.
who are concerned with such important My concern is that those potential readers
issues as the economic evaluation of infor- who are most interested in evaluation,
mation technology (IT) projects, the overall justification and measurement issues will

Journal of Strategic Information Systems 1994 Volume 3 Number 2 149

Book reviews
ignore the book because of its title, and that
those readers who are looking for discussion
of strategic issues will be disappointed. It is
not difficult to understand how such a
mismatch can occur; the title had been
chosen long in advance, and the best of
the contributed articles were focused on
the business value of IT. At that point, it
seems to me, a new title would have been
appropriate, but perhaps the publisher felt it
was too late for that.
The book is organized in three large
sections. The first, ‘Frameworks for assess-
ing the strategic and economic vaiue of IT’,
leads off with the transcript of a debate con-
ducted at the 1991 ICIS on the desirability of
using a case study approach to the study of
IT business value, versus the use of formal
models. Other articles discuss the economic
relationships between IS application port-
folios and organizational strategy, using such
techniques as marginal analysis, cost-benefit
analysis, and financial options theory in IT
investment decisions, and a model for MIS
planning.
The second section, ‘Perspectives on
investments in new ITS’, contains a number
of case studies from various industries,
with the primary focus on assessing the
benefits of the investment. There are cases
on responsive systems, a public electronic
network, using electronic data interchange
(EDI) in the insurance industry, and the
implementation of the ‘Big Bang’ system at
the London Stock Exchange. In the Big
Bang system, the authors note that the
Exchange itself and the investing public
derived substantial benefits but that the
member firms, who actually paid for the
system, are dissatisfied because of the
perception that they would have been better
off without the system. The authors also
point out that these firms, like many other
organizations, tend to measure the value of
an IT investment by comparing their post-
implementation results with their prior
performance. If their competitors modernize
and they do not, however, the firm may not
survive, so comparisons to the status quo are
inappropriate. Other topics covered include
a discussion of relevant research methods
150 Journal of StrategicInformation
for measuring the economic impacts of EDI,
a methodology for study of interorganiza-
tional systems, and knowledge worker
productivity.
Part III, the final section, is entitled
‘Empirical studies of information tech-
nology value’. This set of articles is some-
what broader in perspective and is perhaps
more useful from a practitioner’s point-of-
view than the previous sections. The articles
contain such insights as: system perform-
ance measures should be consistent with the
system’s objectives; the use of IT may lead
to improved performance, but on the other
hand it may be low performance that leads
to the use of IT; in measuring IT effective-
ness, distinguish between firms that imple-
ment well and those which do not; failure
to make this distinction may have led to
incorrect conclusions about IT value.
There is also an excellent article on IT
infrastructure and on why it is so difficult to
justify in advance and to measure its impact
after implementation. There is an extensive
bibliography that is placed, more usefully for
the reader, at the end of the volume, in
contrast to most edited books for which the
references are at the end of each chapter.
Unfortunately, this welcome innovation is
marred by extensive redundancy in the
bibligraphy; one article is listed seven times
and a number of others are listed multiple
times.
Overall, I recommend this book fOTthose
who are interested in well-written and
insightful discussions of the problems of
IT evaluation and justification and the
measurement of IT business value. It should
be useful for most .7%S readers. For me,
some of the articles were of more interest
than others, particularly the Big Bang paper,
the infrastructure article, and several more
in Part III. Other readers will have other
favourites, but almost all of the papers
provide valuable ideas.
Bruce Rallier
University of Bahimore
USA
Systems 1994 Volume 3 Number 2