Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)In short, this book does not teach about management. It hardly teaches anything useful about I.T. and it is not a quality resource for a graduate-level class.
Yes, the content, is all from very current sources. It was very impressive to see this textbook handled in a Fall '09 class when its published date is 2010. However, all that goes aside when reading the book's content. It takes very high-level definitions of commonly-known applications and somehow makes a subject matter out of them. For example, one of the questions in chapter 7 asks to "define the Wi-Fi revolution." I doubt that this buzzwordy term, along with the thousands of other buzzwords that comprise the bulk of subject matter in this book, was important for me to know in a management role. Throughout the book, they drop all kinds of odd abbreviations. In chapter 5, they refer to "EC", which is not defined anywhere in that or any of the previous chapters, and isn't clearly described until chapter 6, which is all about "E-commerce". Lots of e-this and e-that terms are peppered across the boldly-colored pages.
Every other page has something that could be considered a "sidebar" - a large sub-article that is relative to the content of that section - that ends up consuming the entire page. This breaks up the continuity of the book when trying to read through. I will go through a plain white page with black text, see the paragraph wrap in mid-sentence, turn the page expecting to see the rest of the paragraph, and then the page is blue with a whole separate article in a different font. I understand that textbooks do this from time-to-time to add in knowledge relevant to the content, but this happens with the turn of *every* page. The sidebars themselves are discontinuous, all exploding in different shades of pink, blue, or green.
Many of the graphics drawn in the book make no sense. The section on Data Visualisation tells us that graphics are supposed to convey knowledge as drawn from a data source so the information can be understood easily (e.g., a graph). The artists of this book must not have read that chapter.
I'm halfway through the book now and am about to take my midterm this Sunday. Having read half a textbook on IT Management, I haven't read one bit about PMP certification, which is a global standard for project managers. I'm disappointed and will certainly inform my school of this, but I wanted to inform any potential institutions that this textbook is full of fluff and needn't be used.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Information Technology for Management: Improving Performance in the Digital Economy
Information technology has changed how businesses operate and succeed in today's global economy. Organizations can now use IT to transform themselves and achieve a tremendous competitive advantage. Information Technology for Management: Transforming Organizations in the Digital Economy, Seventh Edition highlights how this new technology is changing the current business environment and what effect it has on today's students. The text addresses the major principles of MIS in order to prepare managers to understand the role of information technology in the digital economy. Revised and updated for a junior or senior level MIS or MBA course, this title will give students what they need to succeed in the emerging digital economy.
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