IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

Acknowledgements

As any author knows, you can't successfully bring a book to market without the help of others (besides the publisher). It's one thing having a great idea and producing a draft manuscript from it, but it's quite another thing altogether turning it into a finished product. The 80/20 rule applies to writing too: 80% of the total effort is required to produce the first draft of a manuscript – inevitably replete with inaccuracies, inconsistencies and bad grammar – and the remaining 20% is necessary to turn it into something which people will actually read.

I would therefore like to pay a sincere tribute to all those people who had the unenviable task of finding time in their already-busy schedules to critically read through all or part of the manuscript. Not only did they manage to highlight inconsistencies and areas of disagreement, but they also helped to round off some of the rough edges of my writing style.

So many thanks to (in alphabetical order):

• Anne Barraque-Curie, Associate Program Director, Gartner Executive Programs, who somehow managed to squeeze a review into a very busy time of the year, and whose feedback from the first draft reassured me that the main thesis of the book rested on a firm foundation.

• Catherine Lewko, VP of Finance at Danone, whose unique combination of finance, business and IT experience (few people manage to successfully straddle all three areas) in global companies helped to firm up the financial elements in this book.

• Frederic Dufour, ...