Eliminating “Us And Them”: Making IT and the Business One


Challenging popular notions of what it takes for IT organizations to succeed, IT governance evangelist at CA Technologies Steve Romero presents many of the theories and ideas around IT governance, the key components of successful process management, and behavioral management as key factors in IT’s success.

The topic of IT governance has never been more popular than it is today. Almost every organization recognizes the need to establish sound IT governance, and almost every enterprise is still very immature when it comes to the discipline. This book challenges and calls into question the traditional approaches and strategies for running IT organizations. The concepts presented in the book are timeless, but reflect the recent changes in the organization’s view of the role of the IT department. IT can become a major asset to an organization, often even becoming “the product” in today’s Internet-based sales environment. Eliminating “Us and Them” discusses these changes and presents three areas that contribute most to the change from an alienated and oft-despised department to a key tool for organizational success:

  • An in-depth understanding of IT governance, which has never been more popular than it is today.
  • An in-depth understanding of process and process management, a discipline that more and more enterprises are investing in and establishing formal organizational constructs to enable and support.
  • A case-study view of how an enterprise can establish, promote and instill the values that foster positive behaviors in every person in the organization, with the intent of influencing their ability to realize enterprise goals.

Romero’s insights are based on more than 30 years working in IT and over four years as an IT governance evangelist, traveling around the world, speaking at hundreds of events, and visiting more than 100 companies espousing the approach in this book.

What you’ll learn
If you are an IT professional, you’ll see how you can help become more important to your organization. If you are a manager, you will understand what IT can bring to your organization and how to accomplish it. After reading this book:

  • You will have an acute understanding of IT governance and will be able to engage the topic from a business perspective or an IT perspective.
  • You will gain in-depth insights into the discipline of process management.
  • You will understand the art and science of process management and will have a much greater ability to successfully establish and maintain business processes.
  • You will have an understanding of how behavior influences enterprise success, and how to go about fostering behaviors necessary for enterprise success.

Who this book is for
This topic is a universally recognized problem that finally has a reasonable solution. The book will be quite useful for IT professionals looking to make their role more meaningful in the organization, but the book is written so that managers will come around and see that they have a very important untapped asset—their IT department—that they can turn around quickly to meet the needs of the organization. The book also appeals to laypeople who have seen the disconnect between IT and the organization at large, and are interested in solutions to this problem.

Table of Contents

  1. Us and Them
  2. When IT is “Us” and “Them”
  3. Falling in Love with IT Governance
  4. The State of IT Goverance
  5. IT Governance Decisions
  6. IT Governance Mechanisms
  7. IT Governance Processes
  8. Beginning the IT Governance Journey
  9. Process (And Why Everybody Hates It)
  10. How I Fell in Love with Process
  11. Barriers to Process
  12. Understanding Process
  13. Process Design
  14. Process Implementation
  15. Process Management
  16. Process Roles
  17. Process Governance
  18. Employee Empowerment
  19. The Links Between Behavioral Management, IT Governance and Process
  20. The Critical Nature of Enterprise Values
  21. Process-centric Values and Behaviors
  22. The Challenges of Behavioral Management
  23. Walking the Talk
  24. Why Hasn’t IT Fixed It?
  25. Governance, Process and Organizational Behavior

Book Details

  • Paperback: 264 pages
  • Publisher: Apress (July 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1430236442
  • ISBN-13: 978-1430236443
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