It is now accepted that IT functions are a fundamental part of the competitive business model. Instead of simply offering services IT must create value for the business. The meaning of Information Technology (IT) has changed from just being available to accelerating and facilitating processes to an integral part of the company's mission and strategy. IT governance is what defines the holistic perspective of how to deal with and use IT, especially in large companies. The objective is to create advantages by aligning IT and corporate strategy in order to create value while minimizing risk and monitoring the performance of IT. Many different frameworks and standards have emerged over the last years, providing processes and control objectives for keeping the company's IT in a value-adding track. However, an important issue seems to be the huge availability of various frameworks. This mostly results in problems concerning the right decision on frameworks to be selected. Implementing efficient IT governance requires using only those processes that cover the individual IT-related issues and problems of a company best, while ignoring unnecessary ones. The use of frameworks is associated with costs and may quickly result in an inefficient use of IT governance. The present thesis addresses this challenge and shall help IT decision makers to decide on an efficient framework or set of frameworks. In order to do so, a model analyzes the fit between discovered IT-related problems and various existing publicly available frameworks. Different surveys and market analyses will be used for identifying possible IT-related problems. The creation of problem-clusters will help to determine the most efficient framework by measuring the coverage of processes by different frameworks. As a result, this thesis will provide an approach to avoid processes that may not be necessary while covering important ones for an efficient use of IT governance frameworks. ITIL study materials cover these topics at great length and are a great resource to help you with your ITIL certification and ITIL exam preperation.

This practical title describes the strong financial skills that IT managers must have in order to support:

*Operations: Finance departments rely heavily on IT managers being able to identify, track and measure costs sometimes at a very granular level

*Budgeting: the very technical nature of IT operations means that budgeting can be more complex than many other areas

*Project Delivery: large technical project deliveries means that costs can be correspondingly complex to account for

*Business Modeling; pricing models rely heavily on IT managers skills and accuracy. Where one service supports many commercial offerings a strong model is needed to apportion costs appropriately

*Investment and business cases: a sound understanding of the financial contribution the IT assets make to the overall business is critical to gain support for ongoing investment

This outstanding title covers the main financial concepts that managers need to be familiar with in order for IT to take its proper senior place as a contributor to the business. It assumes a basic level of financial understanding and builds on the techniques required almost daily; therefore it is overwhelmingly practical and based on real world scenarios. Not only are the techniques fully described but issues such as roles, implementation, daily management and even tooling are detailed.

I thought this book would be helpful for finance professionals working in the IT industry. It's actually might be good for the reverse - IT professionals looking for finance help. I've recommended the book to some project managers who found it a little too 'text book' like and basic. Personally, I think if you don't know the stuff in this book you shouldn't be in IT, finance or management.