Amrit Tiwana - It Strategy for Non-It Managers: Becoming an Engaged Contributor to Corporate It Decisions

Amrit Tiwana

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was entirely handwritten in Athens, Georgia, on Tops legal pads made in St. Charles, Illinois, using Hi-Tec-C 0.4mm pens made in Tokyo, Japan. The illustrations were created using SmartDraw.

Author royalties will be donated to charity.

ISBN 9780262341950 (ePub) | 9780262341967 (Kindle)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tiwana, Amrit, 1974 author.

Title: IT strategy for non-IT managers : becoming an engaged contributor to corporate IT decisions / Amrit Tiwana.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and .

Identifiers: LCCN 2017000439 | ISBN 9780262534154 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Information technologyManagement. | Strategic planning. | Information technologyDecision making.

Classification: LCC HD30.2 .T57 2017 | DDC 004.068/4dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000439

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To my mom, her Mac, and the memory of my dad

This is a short book on a vast theme. Its sole purpose: helping non-IT managers become engaged contributors in formulating their firms corporate IT strategy. I believe that their contributions can infuse the competitive oomph into their strategy that their IT colleagues alone cannot.

I base this book on one premise: cheap yet strategic IT is a unicorn only until IT strategy meets non-IT managers. Corporate IT is a business tool; how your firm uses it alone differentiates whether it is a competitive weapon or the costly obstacle that it usually is. IT can make or break businesses. Firms spend more on IT than all other capital assets combined, yet few grasp how it is reshaping their industries and what they can do about it. Within this asymmetry lies the opportunity. Without non-IT managers business acumen in corporate IT decisions, IT lacks purpose. The true quality of corporate IT is how well it advances your firms strategy, not how well it is constructed.

Lack of business involvement is the primary reainvisibleson that IT is often uneconomical and strategically feeble. Its rare that non-IT managers dont want to be involved; they often dont know how. Ill equip you to be sufficiently conversant to create business value with your IT colleagues and help you grasp when, where, and how you can contribute. My goal is to help you ask the right questions. I hope to provide you an enduring foundation and analytical skills to envision IT opportunities to an untrained eye. An engaging conversation needs effort from both sides of the business-IT divide; Ill give you the language to make that effort.

This book is for midlevel functional managersin line functions such as marketing, sales, finance, operations, or accountingwith no IT backgrounds or IT career aspirations. I assume that you have spent three to four years time in the trenches, none and food carts rely on IT to competeand differentiate themselvesin their markets. My examples are global, spanning Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and South America.

This is a textbook, not a scholarly book, an airplane read, or an IT strategy-in-a-box book. Ill give you the tools, but youll have to do the thinking. This book is not intended for IT managers and IT professionals, nor is it intended to make you one. It does not survey the IT field, provide a condensed version of an IT managers training, educate a potential CIO, or create a competent IT manager (). My ideal reader is an executive MBA student who has taken some introductory MBA courses. I assume neither an undergraduate business degree nor prior IT knowledge.

Figure 0.1

This book focuses on the contributions of the shaded part to corporate IT decisions.

This book was born out of exasperation. Imagine buying a shiny new car, only to find its user guide chock-full of explanations of how it works, engineering diagrams, and fuel compression ratios. It might be a mechanical engineers idea of fun, but not an owners. Most existing MBA IT strategy textbooks are like that car manual, attempting to create an IT manager lite. Instead, I focus on what non-IT managers need to know to intuitively grasp how IT fits in your total business. It is jargon-free, acronym-light, and industry-agnostic and focuses on enduring fundamentals. However, it is research-based, building on more than 250 studies by more than 350 researchers cited. I connect IT strategy to your other MBA core courses on strategy, corporate finance, accounting, marketing, operations, and statistics.

I have structured this book as four modules shown in previews the takeaways from each chapter.

Figure 0.2

This book is organized as four modules, which correspond to its four parts.

Table 0.1

Every Chapter Opens with Such a Jargon Decodera Table of Lay Explanations of Its Main Conceptual Ideas