Blind Spot: A Leader's Guide To IT-Enabled Business Transformation
Charlie Feld has an amazing ability to demystify IT and communicate with business leaders clearly and colorfully. His book is a must have for every business leader s library.----Gary Kelly, Chairman and CEO, Southwest AirlinesIn Blind Spot, Charlie Feld provides a clear and simple framework for managing major IT-enabled business transformation. I developed and then taught the Frito-Lay case study at the Harvard Business School for many years. The reason it has been so popular with senior executives is it is more about a business model transformation that was enabled by IT than about technology.----Lynda Applegate, Harvard Business SchoolAboutBlind Spot: A Leader s Guide To IT-Enabled Business Transformation.Think of it as a prescription for bringing clarity, direction and yes, even sanity to the process of deciding how and where to successfully apply information technology to create true business value. In his new book, Blind Spot, veteran CIO and IT turnaround artist Charlie Feld lays out a proven step-by-step framework for IT-enabling a business enterprise. He begins at the very beginning namely, with conceiving and articulating an IT strategy that is aligned with business goals . He walks readers through the process of drawing a clear, well-defined future- state picture of the enterprise. He then leads readers through four successive legs on the journey to IT-enabled business transformation.  What s especially refreshing about this book and Feld s framework overall is that it is based in reality. Throughout the book, Feld provides real-life examples of the challenges and solutions, problems, pitfalls and successes he encountered during his work at Frito-Lay, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and Southwest Airlines. Indeed, it s Southwest founder Herb Kelleher who wrote the book s forward in which he says I understood why the accountants need computers to close the books, but no one ever showed me the value inclusive IT can bring to things that matter to customers like on-time arrivals, ease of boarding or ability to respond to a weather delay until I met Charlie Feld in 2001. This book is required reading for anyone whose work involves identifying and communicating where and how information technology can create business value. The goal of the book is to bring an executive team from a major enterprise together around a framework they can follow to first, envision the possibilities that IT can enable and then to execute on that vision.----Julia King, Executive Editor/National Correspondent, Computerworld