Business @ the Speed of Stupid: How to Avoid Technology Disasters in Business

Business @ the Speed of Stupid is Dan Burke and Alan Morrison's plainspoken prescription for healing the disorders that inevitably develop when unprepared executives rush headlong into high-tech projects. Geared to those reeling from today's techno-shakeout, it starts with 10 troubled corporate scenarios that are colorfully illustrated by anonymous examples drawn from the pair's consultancy practice. In the book's first part, they use them to identify complications that arise when a perceived need for speed gets in the way of serious preparation--such as those stemming from an ill-advised push to launch a flashy new Web site, integrate existing software from numerous departments into a single system, dive wholeheartedly into e-commerce, develop an intranet--and then offer an assessment of the missteps, along with suggestions for avoiding them. ("Never underestimate the difficulty of managing the conflicts between artists and engineers," they write in a chapter called "Mars And Venus." "Both are necessary but solve different problems. You must know which problems are the most important to solve if you are to create the proper team mix and resulting authority structure.") In the second part, they describe tackling the overall problem with their Executive Thought Framework, designed to foster "appropriate and targeted" technology decisions. --Howard Rothman