Readers who are IT managers in organizations doing e-business will most likely be well conversant with tried and trusted methods of the third- or fourth-generation language-based lifecycle methodologies. If these IT managers are experienced enough to have been comfortable with traditional sequential lifecycle models of three- or five-year timeframes with elements of prototyping, then this book is a wake-up call for them to break free from their complacency. The author makes them realize that those “old and ill-fitting” processes and practices have lost their value in the Internet age, and helps readers get those pre-Internet IT methodologies to fit new e-business developments. If IT managers don’t adapt, they run the risk of compromising their businesses altogether.

Published by Springer under its Practitioner Series, this book provides a distinct insight into the new challenges faced by IT managers and their staff within the current Web-based business environment. The author is very clear and refreshingly practical in his explanations of the implications of e-business for IT professionals and the evolving expectations of both internal and external customers. He proposes a model for the e-business IT manager with five hypothetical scenarios of e-business. These five examples are:

• An Internet site in a business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplace, based on existing third-party hosted infrastructure, but with the applications managed in-house;
• A collaborative business-to-business (B2B) solution, where an independent application service provider (ASP) hosts the new shared business application;
• Development of a short message service (SMS) technology for B2C marketing via mobile phones;
• An entirely outsourced e-business development; and
• Development of a core back-office business application.

This book is spread over five well-sequenced chapters, with a brief introduction at the beginning and a short list of references at the end. Starting from the definition and concepts of e-business in the first chapter to the illustrative portfolio of worked-out examples in different e-business scenarios in the last, this book provides an easy and stimulating read for IT practitioners, as well as those business managers who extensively deploy IT in their businesses. The core of the book is the “ASP-plus model” for IT managers, which is advocated by the author. He has compared the proposed approach with the traditional approach on various managerial dimensions, such as business engagement, business process management, IT strategy, change management, infrastructure management, soft skills development, and so on. Each of these dimensions is apparently of direct interest to IT professionals, as well as their business counterparts.

Though this book carries a crisp foreword by Ray Paul, Dean of the Faculty of Technology and Information Systems at Brunel University in the UK, it is definitely not a theoretical work, and therefore may not be of direct appeal to computer science academicians. However, going by the presentation, layout, and contents, all IT professionals, and those business people particularly involved with any of the five e-business scenarios mentioned above, will find it highly valuable.