Waltzing with the Elephant: A Comprehensive Guide to
Directing and Controlling Information Technology

By Mark Toomey
2009: Infonomics 264 Pages
ISBN: 9780980683004

Waltzing with the Elephant! This evocatively titled book is the first Information Communication Technology (ICT) book that I have come across that clearly explains what ICT governance is, why it matters, who is responsible and how you can pragmatically implement appropriate governance. Other books on governance, such as Ross and Weill’s “IT governance: how top performers manage IT decision rights for superior results”, focus on management approaches and more generic issues or, alternatively ICT governance books are based on a single framework, often technology focused, such as COBIT or ITIL. In contrast this book recommends specific approaches and actions for ICT governance.

Waltzing with the Elephant is refreshingly free from jargon, highly approachable, and has direct applicability and value for any organisation that information technology; whether they are multi-national companies with hundreds of thousands of staff, government departments, small businesses, or community groups staffed by a few committed volunteers. The author, Mark Toomey, successfully communicates his extensive experience in assisting organizations to understand and implement ICT governance and provides a usable and valuable resource for the reader to understand and implement effective ICT governance.

Organization Modeling: Innovative Architectures for the 21st Century

by Joseph Morabito, Ira Sack, and Anilkumar Bhate
1999: Prentice Hall PTR     300 Pages
ISBN: 0-13-257552-3

The book introduces the idea of "object-oriented organizational modeling" and discusses the following concepts: why it's dangerous to think of today's IT models as "business models"; how to create and align small-scale "organization molecules" into effective enterprise-wide architectures; envisioning organizational patterns; and integrating data, knowledge, and information.

Constructing Blueprints for Enterprise IT Architectures
by Bernard H. Boar
1999: John Wiley & Sons     352 Pages
ISBN: 0-471-29620-1

Enterprise Architecture Planning: Developing a Blueprint for Data, Applications, and Technology
by Steven H. Spewak with Steven C. Hill
1992: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     392 Pages
ISBN: 0-471-5998591

This book on Enterprise Architecture Planning by Steven Spewak is a classic in the EA community. It was published in 1992, which is the same year that John Zachman published the second of his two seminar articles on an information systems architecture (later renamed as an enterprise architecture framework). The book's Foreword is written by John Zachman, and aligns with much of Zachman's thinking, yet achieves a number of firsts, including; the first book to use "Enterprise Architecture" in its title; the first book to provide an EA methodology; the first book to provide an EA non-matrix model of an EA framework (the 'wedding cake" multi-level model); the first EA approach to specify that current and future views of the architecture should be developed, along with a transition plan.