Co-authored by Swingtide managing director Diane Carco, The Smart Way to Buy Information Technology: How to Maximize Value and Avoid Costly Pitfalls (AMACOM, 1998), is a widely-used guide to information technology sourcing. Called "a graceful marriage of technical expertise and common sense," this book has helped corporate decision-makers all over the world put their IT acquisitions in the proper business context.

Some excerpts:

• In theory, no one disputes the idea that technology acquisitions should be linked to business improvements. But users do not run their businesses, or their companies, in a theoretical business world. The world of business realities they inhabit is full of confusing signals, tentative projections, and unclear forecasts. That world is filled with companies that adopt new technologies to achieve and exploit competitive advantage. Eschewing the latest technology in such a world is risky. So is adopting it.


• Decentralization of the IT acquisition function has forced too many line managers into a situation in which their only ostensibly credible source of information about technology purchases is the technology vendor. As the sole source of information, the vendor has little trouble framing the manager's problem in such a way that it admits of one and only one solution: the vendor's.


• Trying to figure out a number to hang on the bottom-line value of IT has stumped more MBAs than W. Edwards Deming. Even the initial price tag is practically unknowable. Hidden costs, like training time and short-term productivity losses, raise the complexity of the computation to something on the order of Riemannian geometry.


• IT acquisitions might get more corporate attention if the CEO were able to drive past them on the way to work. But because they're invisible, it takes a little more conscious effort, and a lot more corporate discipline, to arrive at an adequate analysis of their costs and benefits.

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