The Adventures of an IT Leader, Updated Edition

In a similar vein, although off-premises IT management was very much a part of the original book, we felt that some unspoken presumptions about outsourcing had shifted in discussions of the cloud. This caused us to make subtle changes throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 14 on vendor partnering. We emphasize, however, that the management ideas on this topic in the original book were quite robust, so these changes are more shifts in tone and language than substance. Finally, we updated many exhibits and deleted a few. The result is an updated and improved book that retains the features people liked about the original and continues to, as we like to say, relentlessly focus on IT as a management subject. The substance of the story has not changed. Our hero, Jim Barton, still makes classic errors, still learns from his mistakes, or occasionally doesn't, and still strives to overcome his own limitations by building a strong IT management team. And, as before, he emerges transformed, a humbled but better IT leader. A Note About Our Extended Narrative Approach As pleased as we've been with the book's popular reception, we've been equally pleased by the interest within the academic community for the special pedagogical approach we used, which we call the Extended Narrative Approach. Its development was something of a journey, and one that had an unlikely beginning. In 2005, two of us, Richard, Dick, and Robert, Rob, were co-chairing Harvard Business School's Executive Program for Chief Information Officers, CIOs. The topics and content for The Adventures of an IT Leader originally derived from our design for that program. It's probably safe to say that this executive program, delivering information services, held a venerated position in the IT industry. Dick co-founded the program in 1971 with HBS professors Neil Churchill, F. Warren McFarlane, and Jim McKinney. As a field, IT management is arguably barely 50 years old, but this program had been around for most of that time. Some companies sent many people to the program over the years, often right before they promoted those people into the CIO position. The alumni were a distinguished group, very prominent throughout the IT field. A number of them went on to become CEOs of their companies. Thematically, the course tended to surprise people. Participants arrived expecting to talk about issues that they read about in the IT trade publications, but we focused instead on the business of IT, the part that would remain the same even as the acronyms and technologies changed with lightning speed. We took the same approach to developing The Adventures of an IT Leader. As case teachers, we wanted to integrate short stories to engage participants with the thematic content, but we had a hard time getting this to work in the traditional business book format, so we decided on a different tack. We started to write a long-form story, a book-length case about a fictitious character in corporation, a new CIO learning on the job. It would be fictitious in the sense of those law-and-order TV shows, addressing events that were fictionalized but actually ripped from the headlines, that is, drawn from our field case research on situations that had really happened in the world of IT. This new path provided us with an initial jolt of renewed vigor, but then we hit another wall. This time it was for a different reason. Putting together the story of Jim Barton, our hapless CIO, required us to apply writing competencies akin to those of novelists as well as of business professors. We might have reverted to our standard book approach if our writing team had not been joined at that point by Shannon O'Donnell. Shannon had come to Harvard Business School by an unusual path. Previously, she had been a director and dramaturg at the People's Light and Theater, a highly regarded professional theater company near Philadelphia. In one directing experience, Shannon had made use of The Hero's Journey, also known as The Monomyth, an archetypal pattern within stories first described by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell points out that many of the world's most important and impactful narratives share the same basic plot structure. A reluctant hero is called to action, refuses the call at first, then goes on a journey.