This written by Ladi Adefala. I first met Ladi at a security conference where he was a speaker, and liked him immediately, not just because he played some Madonna before he took the stage. Ladi’s professional background includes stints at Accenture, Red Hat Consulting, AT&T, World Wide Technology and Fortinet. He now has his own consultancy where he specializes in cybersecurity and executive leadership services, helping organizations, CEOs and board directors with their IT and security strategy. I thought given his background he would be a great reviewer for this new book. Take it away Ladi.

If you are a small business and you are struggling to be effective in using digital technology, then you should read a new book, Demystifying IT, by Bhopi Dhall and Saurajit Kanungo. The two are experienced IT managers who will help you resolve some of your issues and help leverage your IT to produce greater business benefits.

Many of these struggles aren’t new problems, especially for this market. IT is often seen as a cost center and not to drive bigger profits. The authors demonstrate this mindset is a leadership failure, something that I have experienced first-hand when consulting with many of my small business clients. These failures take one of two potential paths:

1. Lack of any eureka moments: Leaders that haven’t yet had an insightful encounter about IT’s strategic value tend to remain stuck with the IT-as-overhead mindset. True insight changes an organization’s core belief and pushes everyone into some unified action, working towards a common goal.
2. Fears brought on by past failures: The second reason is the long shadow cast by past failures with IT projects. Leaders avoid engaging in major IT projects that would drive measurable business impact simply because they’ve had a previous bad experience. Just because our last ERP system implementation failed or was painful doesn’t mean we shouldn’t upgrade our ERP system or change it.

I once tried to get one client to implement using electronic funds transfers rather than mailing printed checks, something that would have saved them $200,000 annually. Two years later, the CEO had his eureka moment.

I have also worked with organizations who have kept their core IT application system for twenty years without a major upgrade, partly because of some ancient, failed implementation experience. Here’s the surprising part for me, they didn’t know it had been that long since an upgrade until they overcame this failure moment and made the move to a modern cloud-based system.

The most effective IT strategies is to appeal to both the head and the heart. This book provides numerous examples and stories of how organizations have leveraged IT in practical and meaningful ways. The trick is to align their leadership teams to both the business and IT functions and for everyone to work together. And for the CEO to be fully behind this as well, something that the McKinsey co-authors of CEO Excellence focused on in their book. A CEO’s mindset has to reflect this commitment for IT to succeed in driving a business’ success.

If CEOs and board directors of organizations have a desire to increase their effectiveness and business performance in the digital economy, I would encourage you to invest some time in reading this book. By doing so, you’d have sown a seed that’ll yield a significant harvest now and in the future.

Burl Brooks walked into the Southern Missouri American Red Cross chapter in Springfield, Mo. Looking for a better winter coat and left with a new bicycle. Well, almost. While it wasn’t an immediate transaction, Brooks took advantage of a unique program that the chapter administers with its partnership with the United Way of the Ozarks through its Veterans Fund. I interviewed him for the chapter’s blog here.