In their book entitled "IT Savvy" (see all new experimental Amazon sidebar below) Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross have done something that does us all a favour. The subtitle "What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain," is brilliant positioning for which we should all be grateful.

Most experienced practitioners know that the problems enterprises have in delivering new business capabilities cannot ALL come from IT's lousy project execution. Some part of the blame for the low rate of project success must come from the ever urgent demands of the customer, who in the name of "business imperative" wreak havoc with any attempt to create a coherent enterprise architecture.

It should come as no surprise then that the authors penned an earlier book entitled "Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution" - which oddly does NOT get referenced in the "IT Savvy" book. Could it be that they do not want to show where they are taking the executives? Certainly recrafting enterprise architecture as an "Operating Model" and aiming to establish a "Digitized Platform" for the business attempts to soften IT jargon.

Maybe using more business acceptable terminology is a lesson we can all learn. In the meantime, all power to any attempt at educating executives on how to make their IT more of a strategic asset.