A CIO's plea for an end to "benefits fraud" and the life-enhancing upside of "lifelogging" - two of the latest must-reads for CIOs:

Realising Benefits from Government ICT Investment - A fool's errand?

Stephen Jenner
Although the production of this book is a little amateurish, the content is anything but. Jenner, the former director of UK Criminal Justice IT and a close advisor to UK government CIO John Suffolk, tackles the single biggest challenge of IT - ensuring it delivers the benefits and the value it promises. His comprehensive and sometimes painful analysis of why so many IT projects fail is peppered with candid case studies, mostly drawn from firsthand experience. What follows is a master-class in getting IT right - through a focus on actively managing IT project value across the full system lifecycle, ensuring business cases are watertight, and capturing the full spectrum of the value created.
(Published by academic-publishing.org)
Key message: "You need a 'fool' to challenge the assumptions that masquerade as facts in business cases."

Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything

Gordon Bell & Jim Gemmell
A principle researcher at Microsoft, IT legend Gordon Bell has been a living experiment for the past 10 years: he has recorded digitally every aspect of his life - documents, artefacts, conversations, ideas, journeys, heartbeats, the lot. "Lifelogging", he believes, is something we'll all be able to do within the next decade, thanks to limitless storage capacity and the advent of software allowing effortless cataloguing and retrieval of "e-memories". This entertaining, thoughtful and thought-provoking book draws some compelling conclusions on how Bell believes the ability to recall everything will improve every aspect of our lives, from work to personal relationships, from health to education - and even our after-lives. Prepare to change the way you live, work and think, forever.
Key message: "Total Recall will shake our societies and change our cultures."