Austin Robert Daniel - The Adventures of an IT Leader, Updated Edition with a New Preface by the Authors

Since its publication in 2009, The Adventures of an IT Leader has been widely embraced, both by managers as a business book and by professors and students as a text used in university classes. At last report, more than 440 universities in more than 35 countries have adopted the book or some part of it in their IT management curriculum, and it has been translated into Japanese and Russian. We have been pleased with reviews of the book from media like the Wall Street Journal and from reader reviews on Amazon. It has played well in the corporate arena too: excerpts were published online by www.cio.com, and IT executives have weighed in to acknowledge its relevance to practice. An ongoing theme in many of the reviews suggests that the story itself is engaging; readers report having trouble putting the book down and that they stay awake long into the night to see what will happen.

So why a new edition? In recent years, especially the last few, we have received an increasing number of e-mails from people telling us they like the book, but that certain details, especially specific technologies, have aged badly.

As we all know, technology moves fast, and there is an unfortunate tendency (especially among students) to notice the obsolete details and conclude that the management lessons must be equally out-of-date. This is far from true, of course, as pretty much everyone who has written to us has said: the vast majority of the management lessons in the book remain as relevant as ever. Nevertheless, reader perceptions matter. So most of these e-mails closed with a request something like this: Please create a new edition with updated details.

That is exactly what we have done. Not only have we worked our way through the book to make updates, we have also tried to avoid using technical acronyms du jour and other details that might age badly. We believe this approach will ensure that the book remains relevant for many more years. Even more important, such an update is entirely consistent with a central theme of the book, stated in the opening chapter: The need for shrewd IT management does not vanish when overhyped technologies do.

In creating the new edition, we have carefully integrated some new material, too. Most notably, what used to be now addresses the challenges raised when people expect personal devices, such as smartphones, to interact with corporate systems. And the new chapter 17 explains how technology can be used to enhance an organizations innovative capabilities. As new business models and processes for value creation enabled by information technology continuously emerge, we thought it important to dedicate more of our attention to the subject of innovation.

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 , 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 mistakesor occasionally doesntand 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.