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

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

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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 growing recognition that it wasn't enough to simply change a process with technology, one also had to change the human practices that supported it. Thus was born the concept of IT as a corporate change agent or change manager. However, although corporate change has become increasingly significant during the last decade, what has remained constant is the concept of the organization itself. Today, most organizations are still the same recognizable entities they have always been. This is about to change.

Whereas in the 1990s change focused around processes, in the next five years we will see the beginning of the radical transformation of organizations themselves. The advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s has opened up new possibilities for doing business across organizational boundaries. Tapscott et al. (2000) suggest that as businesses come to recognize and exploit these opportunities, they will soon realize that technology can be used to create and enhance inter-enterprise effectiveness and efficiency. Over the next five years, companies will initiate major experiments with inter-organization ventures to explore new ways of structuring enterprises to deliver value. Tapscott et al. (2000) predict that several new, inter-enterprise business structures will emerge in the coming decade, such as those that integrate across a value chain (e.g., Dell Computers) or that aggregate goods for other companies (e.g., Amazon.com). IT will provide the means to facilitate such corporate transformations, and IT staff will be instrumental both in identifying the possibilities available and establishing the mechanisms whereby these new ways of business will operate.

Internally too, businesses will begin to look significantly different, due to improving applications of technology, integration, and knowledge and to management's increasing need for structures and processes that can respond rapidly to external pressures and growing customer demands. There will thus be a significant broadening of IT's change management responsibilities as companies realize that technology can not only be used to make its processes more effective and efficient but can also fundamentally transform the way business operates.

In short, IT's mission will grow to be more than facilitating change. Over the next five years, we will see organizations expecting IT to be front and center in the drive to transform almost every aspect of the business: from how it delivers value, to how it is structured, to how it operates internally.

IT Function

In the 1990s, business automation for individual departments became increasingly pass. Instead, IT organizations were asked to work with business managers at higher and higher levels in the corporation to develop corporate-wide applications to improve organizational work processes. This involved changing many of the fundamental ways in which work was done-eliminating steps altogether, simplifying processes, integrating them with related processes or by restructuring them. This corporate re-engineering function gave IT a new mandate to seek broader corporate-wide synergies and to link existing functional areas in new ways. In the process, businesses cut layers of management and began to see themselves in terms of processes rather than functions. As the decade progressed, it became clear to senior managers that the IT organization and its staff had a much broader corporate perspective than other functional areas, and were thus able to suggest worthwhile new ways of deploying technology across departmental "stove-pipes" to benefit the organization as a whole. Thus, CIOs and IT staff came to be seen as having an increasingly strategic role to play in the organization. By 2000, more than three-quarters of CIOs were either on the board or the executive committee of their respective organizations (Maruca, 2000).

Over the next five years, the IT function will increasingly come to be valued for its unique perspective on both the corporation and technology and its ability to use this perspective to facilitate strategy development and mobilize strategy for the business. IT will have two key contributions to make to strategy formation. First, as the Internet and electronic commerce become a greater and greater portion of a business, IT will be expected to play a key role in developing and implementing the organization's e-business strategies. Second, as technology continues to evolve and diversify rapidly, IT will be expected to become more strategic about its technology policy and to present this strategy to senior management in ways that can be effectively integrated into business strategy.

These new strategic functions will require IT staff and management to develop new competencies, such as business acumen and leadership skills. They will also mean that, for the first time, IT decisions and actions will be in an area where they will have a direct impact on the corporate bottom line. Whereas in the past, the influence of systems has been mediated by other company staff, increasingly over the next five years, through the Internet and other customer-facing technologies, IT systems will interact directly with customers. Thus, the IT function will, of necessity, become more outward-looking and more concerned with business value than previously. It will also become more visible both within the organization and externally. For example, focus group members noted that they have already begun to see their stock prices vary as market analysts assess their company's e-commerce strategies. This pressure can only increase in the near term as both customers and the market vote with their dollars on the quality of IT's work.

IT Management

Focus group members believe that there is no question that the job of the IT manager has got increasingly complex. As Table 1.1 demonstrates, over the years more and more responsibilities have been heaped on IT's plate. But the tone of management is also changing. In the 1980s, responding to user criticisms that it was inflexible and bureaucratic, IT tried to react to users' needs by creating support functions and adopting client-centered methodologies. However, in the 1990s this style of management was no longer enough. Many IT managers were dismayed to discover that their users expected them to be proactive in their vision for how IT could help the company respond to business change by improving processes and developing new products and services. During this decade, IT managers explored a variety of ways to develop this skill. For example, they looked for ways to effectively combine a client-centered business orientation with the knowledge of how IT can change and improve company processes.

In the future, however, even more will be expected of IT managers. In the rapidly changing business and technical environment in which they will be operating, IT managers will be expected to anticipate coming trends and to propose business strategies to take advantage of them. As business cycles shorten to become almost spontaneous and technology outstrips the ability to assimilate it, IT managers will be expected to look even further forward and develop strategies that will enable the company to fulfill needs as they develop.

Continues...

Excerpted from Making IT Happenby James D. McKeen Heather A. Smith Excerpted by permission.
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