The person who runs the company sees IS as being the provider of solutions. "Don?t tell me about function point productivity. What we want is faster turnaround time for systems and we?re not getting it!" The person who runs the IS division recognizes that it has a strategic role. "The management is locked into a 1980s timewarp ? how do I persuade them that IS has more to offer than in the past?" The aim of the book is to step into the middle ground. It emphasizes the important role an IS manager plays in the development of the company strategy. It will show how the everyday problems need to be seen in a fresh perspective ? that of balancing the competing pressures of business and technology. Get too far from the technology and too close to the business, and technology will pull you back. Get focused on technology and lose sight of the business, and the business will make sure you know about it. The goal of this book is to provide IS managers with balanced information to guide them. Why does it matter? Because, in many ways, the future of our organizations is in the hands of today?s IS managers. Management Challenges in IS will help them make wise and thoughtful choices.
About the Author
James D. McKeen and Heather A. Smith say that they never planned to write a book. When they started the Queen's IT Management Forum, their interests were purely academic. They wanted to find out what was happening in the front line of the "IT wars" in organizations. They quickly discovered that if there was a need in academia to learn more about IT in organizations, then there was an equal need in organizations to learn more about the big picture trends in using IT. Their work, and this book, is the outcome of a new form of scholarship. It bridges the gap between the practical, everyday knowledge of the IS manager and the measured thoughtful knowledge of the academic researcher. The former is anecdotal and incomplete -- the latter is methodologically sound and thorough but often of little practical help to the IS manager.
