Book Review fruITion: Corporate IT Strategies by Chris Potts

fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology

by Chris Potts

Many organisations struggle over the best place for IT within the organisation and extracting the best business value from investment.

In his recent book fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology respected CIO commentator Chris Potts sets out his views in a very easy to read fashion. His main themes are that having IT as a separate department has failed to deliver business benefits from investment, that IT should be (largely) integrated into the business units and that initiatives should be treated as business change projects rather than IT projects.

He also concludes that there shouldn’t be CIOs. Rather, there should be an individual (in the book he uses the title "Chief Internal Investment Officer") whose job it is to lead the internal investment portfolio, including all resulting business change, and be accountable for the value the organisation gets out of its investments.

Whilst agreeing with much of what Chris Potts says, the aspect this doesn’t consider is the role that IT has in innovation - bringing radically different ways of working to the organisation; not something that will generally come from within existing business units. The most obvious examples of this are Amazon in retail and Google with advertising (although innovation isn't always as ground breaking as this).