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.
About the Author: Tom received his BS in Electronics Engineering and a minor in mathematics from Oklahoma State University. While there, he published his first paper in "The Oklahoma State Engineer". That paper won first place in a Big Eight Universities competition. Tom accepted a commission in the United States Air Force. While an Air Force Officer, and later as a Department of Defense civilian, he managed technology program management teams responsible for communications and electronics installations in the Middle East, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio and other military installations in the Ohio region. His Plans and Programs duties included disaster preparedness; survival, recovery, reconstitution and war planning. After leaving the Air Force, Tom went to work for a technology division of the Mead Corporation responsible for designing and operating their networks in support of what was at that time the world's largest on-line, full-text search and retrieval data base. He eventually moved to Mead Corporate Staff where he successfully integrated their network operations and directed the modernization of the corporation's client computing services systems. He participated in a Vision Team which successfully established a long term IT Vision for the corporation. Tom later went to work for CompuServe/UUNet. Over three years he integrated the operations of their Class A web hosting data centers while the operation was expanding from three to twenty data centers across North America. Most recently, Tom contributed his experience to his local community as the Chief Technology Officer for a team supporting several cities in southwestern Ohio. In this role he provided technology support to the regional Tactical Crime Suppression Unit and the Organized Crime Task Force. He has been featured in a cover article in "Wireless for the Corporate User", and has been published in "Telecommunications Magazine" and "Community Media Review". He is co-author of an AT&T Labs paper presented in Munich, served as the Bell Labs liaison for the Mead Corporation and has been personally highlighted in an AT&T annual report as an example of collaborative customer innovation. Tom is married with four children and a growing number of grandchildren. These days he is indulging a life-long desire to share his experiences by writing on a number of subjects reflecting his broad range of interests.