I read about this book in CFO & CIO so I picked up a copy. For a book written by a professor and a consultant, I found it to be very practical and easy to understand. As a turnaround manager I read a lot of business books and strategy publications and was pleasantly surprised at how approachable, yet valuable the book was. I checked out the documents featured on the book's website (...) and found them to be very useful and comprehensive. In fact, I will probably use some of these documents as frameworks for a project I am currently working on for my client.

Overall, I think the book does a great job at outlining a practical framework and approach to portfolio management. What's more, the book's concepts and tools seem fairly easy to implement....which is always a good thing.

I don't read a lot of business books because most of them are to hard to apply to everyday business issues. As a senior executive, this book gives me and my staff real food for thought on how to make decisions about our may funded projects that can't all be kept with the economy the way it is. Great read and practical for the project owners.

Connecting the Dots is a great read for anyone working in IT management. It can help you gain better control of your capital expenditures and information technology projects - both critical success factors in our industry.

Some of the ideas in the book are new and some aren't, but the book has done a great job at simplifying these concepts (ie. portfolio management) and making them accessible and usable. Instead of the usual 'pie in the sky' statements, this book dives into a company and illustrates how the tools and frameworks can be used in a typical business. It's refreshing to find the kind of book that can help you manage the execution of these issues.

The book claims that a company's project portfolio is what moves it into the future and provides great tools and techniques that teach you how to get your company to focus on producing business results and think about the bigger picture: where all these projects are actually taking your organization. The book also does a good job at helping you bridge the technology and business sides of an organization even though I could have done without the business history lesson in Chapter 2.

This book can easily be read in two to three hours. I just read it over the weekend and was able to start applying some of the ideas.

The book is poorly organized and sentences are poor written. It's way too hard to read and understand the point the authors are trying to make. A lot of run-on sentences, which creates a lot of confusion. The only good thing is the examples given in the book. The price is WAY TOO HIGH.

[This review applies to the 2003 updated version only]
I have been searching, mostly in vain, for a text that will be useful in examining the strategic relationship of business and IT. There were some fine books written in the eighties and early nineties, but very little wisdom has been written since the advent of the networked office and the networked economy. There's tons of e-blather out there, but most was written during the 1997-2000 Internet frenzy that distorted all perspectives. This book is the first to give thoughtful coverage to problems and solutions in the alignment of business needs and IT initiatives. It covers legacy issues, conversion and compatibility, examining typical problems, noted failures, and best-of-breed solutions. It's not full of some egghead professor's theories and paradigms that give new names to old issues; instead it covers relevant case studies to make genuine points. This is not a "how-to" manual, but it is an essential overview. Every CIO should read this, and every CEO should read this and then critically examine the CIO, the IT staff, and its relationship to the business. If you are reasonably intelligent, you don't need to be IT-trained to appreciate most of the authors' points. Recommended.

The authors do a great job of addressing several issues relating to managing I.S. in a Corporate environment. Several chapters were excellent -- especially regarding the people and process sides of the I.S. world. Authors provide clear and concise information and insight. Other chapters are not as good -- for example the Electronic Commerce trends and opportunities are already dated, as they were pre-1999 examples and extremely dated in the Internet world. Book is "pricey" but worth one to add to your library.