Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James McKeen is currently a Professor of MIS at the School of Business, Queen''s University at, Kingston, Canada and is the Founding Director of the Queen's Centre for Knowledge-Based Enterprises, a research think-tank for the knowledge economy. He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota. His research interests include IT strategy, the management of IT, and knowledge management in organizations. His research has been published widely in many of the key academic Management and IS journals. Jim has been working in the field of IS for many years as a practitioner, researcher, and consultant. He is a frequent speaker at business and academic conferences.
 
Heather Smith is currently a Senior Research Associate at the School of Business, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada specialiszing in IT and Knowledge Management research. A former senior IT manager, she now works with organizations across North America to identify and document leading-edge practices to bring the best of academic research to practising IT managers. In addition to her work at Queen's, Heather collaborates extensively on research projects with a number of top international researchers in IT management issues. She is a Research Associate of the American Society for Information Management's Advanced Practices Council and Chair of the IT Excellence Awards University Advisory Council. Her research has been published in a variety of journals.
 
Since 1990, the authors have convened three industry forums on a regular basis - the IT Management Forum, the KM Forum and the CIO Brief. Each is designed to link academia and industry in order to jointly tackle important business issues. Management Challenges in IS: Successful Strategies and Appropriate Action (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) was based on their earlier work with the IT Management Forum.

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Making IT Happen tackles a specific key issues in IT management, such as project prioritization, change management, infrastructure development and project leadership. Each chapter looks at a current hot topic, positions it within a managerial framework, and presents proven strategies for dealing with the issue effectively.
 
This book offers important insights into the problems of using technology effectively, which face business and IT managers today. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, combining the collective wisdom of practising IT managers with the best research available on a topic.
 
For graduate and executive MBA students, it introduces a real- world perspective to the study of IT management. For IT managers, this book offers achievable, near-term solutions to their pressing problems.
 
A follow-up to their highly-rated book, Management Challenges in IS, McKeen and Smith help bring clarity to the complex world of IT management.
 
Praise for McKeen and Smith's earlier book, Management Challenges in IS
 
".... this is a valuable and practical review, written with academic thoroughness but delivering practical information which is immediately usable by the manager at work." The Computer Bulletin, (five star rating, and Book of the Month)
 
"The book .... should be compulsory reading for anybody involved at the decision-making end of IS/IT .... I found it impossible to put down and am seriously thinking of suing the authors for loss of sleep caused by HAVING to read their book!" IMS Journal
 
"Shorn of all the jargon, buzzwords and hype typical of the computing field, this book most speaks in business management language." New York Review of Books

Aus dem Klappentext

Information technology (IT) presents many challenges to managers. Constant change, e-business, massive amounts of information, global operations, and building new alliances and capabilities are just some the transformations being driven by the use of IT in business today. No modern manager can afford to ignore IT or leave it to the professionals. This book tackles the tough issues of managing in an environment where IT is everywhere.
 
Based on the real life experiences of senior IT managers in leading- edge businesses and incorporating thorough research, Making IT Happen separates fact from fad, shows where managers can make a real difference, and provides useful and practical advice for coping in the fast-paced world of IT.
 
"This is the first real handbook of IT management. It's well-grounded, reliable in its recommendations, sensible, comprehensive and useful. Those are all compliments; they are what we need in the post dot.com era and after all the transformation-is-now-and-real-easy hype of IT. This is a book about putting IT to work." Peter Keen, Chairman of Keen Innovations and Professor at Delft University
 
"This book provides a template - targeted at the executive level - of the technology and organizational issues that need to be dealt with and well-grounded means (decision structures and decision processes) for handling these issues. A particular, and very unique, strength of the book is the manner in which McKeen and Smith skilfully blend and leverage the best thinking of leading scholars and successful IT executives. As a consequence, the book should prove valuable both for IT executives confronting today's IT management challenges and for scholars seeking to better understand this dynamic and elusive context." Robert Zmud, Michael F. Price Chair of MIS, University of Oklahoma, and Research Director, Advanced Practices Council of SIM, International
 
"Jim McKeen and Heather Smith have captured the essence of the most challenging pursuit of modern civilization - designing and building advanced information systems. Some believe that we are entering a new era of pervasive computing blurred with advanced networks, which delivers unprecedented and untold opportunities and capability. This book addresses the challenges with outstanding insight and wisdom. It is a must read for every person who is involved in information systems and technology - from CIOs right through to students thinking of entering this profession." Eugene Roman, Chief Information & Technology Officer, Bell Canada

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Making IT Happen

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Yet another revolution has begun in the field of information systems. When it is over, IS departments as they are currently constituted will be dismantled. Independent software specialists will dominate the development of systems, programming and other software. Users will completely control individual information systems. (Dearden, 1987)

Business processes will take center stage in eBusinesses, forcing the IT organization as we know it to disappear. Technology management will become the responsibility of business process owners-both inside and outside the corporation. (Cameron, 2000)

At the beginning of the fifth (or sixth) decade of the "information age"-depending on how you count-it is both amusing and frustrating to see the consistency of the pundits on information technology (IT). Predicting the demise of IT seems to be a theme. At the start of the current decade, they're still at it. Articles with titles like "IT department faces extinction" (Marron, 2000) and "Are CIOs obsolete?" (Maruca, 2000) are challenging the concept of a separate IT department within organizations. The experts cite trends such as the growth of e-business and the rise of application service providers as well as the increasing technical sophistication of users as the reasons that IT, as a separate entity, will likely disappear into the rest of the organization in the future.

Conversely, other research groups are predicting dire shortages of IT staff. The GartnerGroup (1999c) writes:

Through 2004, market demand for relevant and specialized IT skills and know how will continue to outstrip supply.

By 2006, nearly half the workers in developed global economies will be employed by industries that either produce IT or use IT intensively.

Similarly, it has been found that the scope and depth of the chief information officer (CIO) role is expanding, the status of IT is rising in most organizations, and that the CIO's formal power is increasing (Maruca, 2000).

This chapter tries to make sense of the challenges that are facing IT, particularly over the next five years, and how they will shape the organization that everyone loves to hate. We selected a five-year term as being the best time frame in which to predict meaningful change. This has proven to be remarkably accurate in the past (see McKeen and Smith, 1996). We believe that to look further ahead than five years is not only extremely difficult, but is ineffective given the pace and rate of change in the business and IT environment. This chapter presents the findings of this focus group. After a brief overview of the environment in which IT will find itself in the not-so-distant future and a look at how IT has changed over time, we then discuss IT's evolving role and responsibilities in each of these areas.

THE CHANGING IT FUNCTION

More so than any other organizational function, IT has had to face pressures for continual change and challenge. For example, in the mid-1990s we wrote: "It is evident that a more sophisticated mechanism for delivering IS to the organization is now required. Like the process of retooling an outdated factory to turn out products faster and more efficiently, the IS function must undergo a change that is no less comprehensive it if is to fulfill its organizational mandate ... the risk of not doing so is increasing inadequacy and eventual obsolescence" (McKeen and Smith, 1996). Five years later, we read, "IT needs to transform itself, the way it operates, the way it does business. Those who are not successful will disappear" (Marron, 2000).

This kind of pressure stems from two sources: the changing business environment and the changing technology landscape. Ten years ago, globalization, merger mania, deregulation, and electronic commerce not only didn't exist, no one had even predicted them (Maruca, 2000). Similarly the relentless improvements in all forms of technology, many of which were predicted, have led to a huge variety of applications that have continually surprised and challenged IT and business managers alike. Just keeping up with these vast and varied changes has left everyone breathless. And it is unlikely that the pace of change is going to abate. In fact if there is one thing that everyone agrees on it's that change is going to increase.

While every organizational function has been affected by these business and technology changes, none has faced more of them than IT. This is because as the function charged with delivering technical solutions to business problems, it sits squarely at the intersection of these two massive forces. One way the IT organization has coped is by dramatically expanding the scope and number of its responsibilities. Table 1.1 illustrates how these have changed over the last two decades. This "add-on" feature is one of the most characteristic features of the changes affecting IT over the last 20 years. It also explains why IT is becoming increasingly more difficult and complex to manage. In fact, some organizations represented in the focus group are beginning to recognize that the demands of managing such an entity are so great that they require more than one person and have created a chief technology officer (CTO) as well as a chief information officer (CIO). Others are creating an "office of the CIO" staffed with several senior people, each with very specific responsibilities (Maruca, 2000).

Whatever the future holds for the IT department itself, it is clear that IT and its central place in the organization will get more important in the foreseeable future. To cope, IT departments will have to adapt. As Table 1.1 shows, IT's influence now encompasses not only much of the traditional organization, but is also expanding to include the new forms of organization toward which the world is evolving. Looking ahead to the next five years, our focus group managers saw a critical and important role for IT in both these areas, helping companies to adapt to the new business and technological realities they are facing.

THE IT ORGANIZATION IN FIVE YEARS' TIME

Focus group members faced a wide variety of challenges in their day-to-day jobs and each placed a different emphasis on what would be the most important one for their particular IT organization in the future. For example, one manager believed that IT staffing would be a driving issue behind the future of IT, while others felt it would be e-commerce or the major new technologies that are just hitting the market (i.e., wireless and unlimited bandwidth). However, together the members painted a compelling picture of the shape and face of the IT organization in the next five years. Table 1.2 summarizes their vision and contrasts it with that of the previous two decades. The remainder of this chapter will discuss each of the features of the IT organization of the future.

IT Mission

The concept of the IT organization leading or driving corporate change was introduced in the early 1990s, along with the notion of re-engineering. It was the first time that organizations had realized that technology could be used to dramatically change how company processes worked. Instead of "paving the cow paths", IT could be used to eliminate or short-circuit many time-honored practices. With this realization came a...