Publisher's Synopsis
Creating an IT Strategy for an enterprise of any kind requires a strong combination of leadership, vision and planning. This book, "Information Technology Strategic Leadership", condenses over forty years of the author's IT leadership and planning experience into a structured, but flexible method for creating an IT Strategic Plan that will enhance any enterprise's effectiveness. It is applicable to corporations, private businesses, non-profit enterprises and government entities. Information Technology is one of the most rapidly evolving of any career field. This presents both a challenge and a great opportunity. Anyone in the IT field knows about the challenge of keeping up. However, "Information Technology Strategic Leadership" addresses the opportunity of using the fast pace of IT to accelerate the growth of, and improve the opportunities for, the core enterprise that the IT team is supporting. "Information Technology Strategic Leadership" first addresses IT leadership as the most important ingredient in strategic planning and devotes itself to this discussion in two different ways. The author first presents a set of Leadership Rules tailored to IT managers and executives. With these rules as a backdrop the book moves into the essential elements of great IT leadership. The book then steps into a discussion that guides IT leaders toward the development of an IT Vision that will support, and even enhance, the enterprise Vision. In the last part of the book, this leadership-inspired vision is used as a platform to create a strong infrastructure. Vision and infrastructure then combine to be the basis for a Strategic Plan. A major premise of the book is that "Technology is easy; business change is tough". Information technology teams install voice, wireless, network, data and computing systems and provide them as tools to help people get their daily tasks done. These are challenging things to install properly and keep working on a daily basis. However, the technologist who is fully integrated into the business of the enterprise will soon realize that the real challenge is using the technology to bring marketplace value through business change. The author makes it clear that the CIO and team who bring the full power of technology value to the business will dramatically improve the enterprise's position in their industry and the position of the IT team in their enterprise. While IT may be ever-changing, IT leaders need to be consistent in the technical and business plans they put forward. Planning is a long-term process which works best when the IT planning horizon is three to five years long. This long term plan is really the description of the infrastructure on which all applications will be layered during the planning cycle. The applications will evolve more quickly than the technical infrastructure which will be in support of, and based on the requirements of, the enterprise infrastructure. The IT leader must then focus on and promote in frequent conversations the integrated technical/enterprise infrastructure. The applications will then evolve on top of this stable structure. It is stressed throughout "Information Technology Strategic Leadership" that IT executives must be leaders first and technologists second. Excellent leaders treat people with respect. They have great vision and know how to create strategic plans to reach that vision. A major goal of this book is to improve that experience for today's technologists coming up through the ranks and encourage the development of an IT middle and senior management corps that is much more strongly focused on leadership skill than on technological expertise. One of the author's core beliefs is his first rule of leadership: "People will meet your expectations." This is true whether those expectations are high, low or somewhere in between. People will meet your expectations.
