Faculty
Robert D. Austin

Course Coordinator
Robert D. Austin

Graduates of BSc or similar programmes with interest or experience in strategy, leadership, administration, organisation, finance or any of many other fields relevant to the practice of IT management as generalmanagement. Students with diverse educational background and experience are encouraged to attend

This course examines important issues in IT management through the eyes of Jim Barton, a talented business (i.e., non-IT) manager who finds himself thrust into the Chief Information Officer (CIO) role at a troubled financial services firm. The course follows Barton through his learning, challenges, mistakes, and travails, asking students to comment on his choices and critique his decisions. He must confront problems related to skill and talent management; IT costs, budgets, value, and chargeback systems; priority setting and financial justification of IT investments; project management; runaway projects; underperforming vendors; data security risks and crises; Web 2.0 policies; and communications with other senior executives. As Barton encounters challenges and difficulties, we address those in depth through associated case studies and readings. As we examine and critique both research and case accounts of events in real companies, we will derive a workable general frameworks for managing IT as a business leader.

This course has been jointly developed with Richard L. Nolan at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA). It draws material and structure from the Harvard Business School executive course for CIOs chaired by Professor Austin.

Teaching methods:

The course will be conducted using the “case method” in the Harvard Business School style, which involves discussion, debate, and interaction in class. Students will be asked to bring their own views into discussion, to share learning with fellow students. Class attendence and participation will be important if you want to do well in the course, because theoretical materials will be developed and critiqued during class sessions, not just in readings. Class discussion will also, in effect, be practice for the oral exam.

This course is designed to help students integrate their theoretical and experential learning from this and other courses into an overall framework for IT leadership. We will focus on managerial rather than technical issues; although for many of the problems we will address, managerial and technical issues are intermingled and will need to be teased apart before effective decisions can be reached.

This course builds students’ capacity for experiential learning (Kolb, 1976) by exercising both deductive (left side of the Kolb learning cycle) and inductive reasoning capabilities (right side of the Kolb cycle; see, Austin, Nolan, and O’Donnell, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2009). That is, students will reason from theoretical frameworks to predict and make judgments about application to practice (deductive reasoning), but they will also reason from case facts and outcomes to refine theoretical formulations (inductive reasoning). The objective is to encourage students to develop a complete (deductive + inductive) learning capability. Because of the discussion- and critique-oriented nature of the course, students will develop and refine skills for presenting arguments persuasive to others and for listening to others; they will practice putting theoretical ideas into action and be forced to confront situations where theory and practice do not meet up neatly.

After taking this course, students should be able to:

Individual oral exam (20 min) based on a mini project. The written paper made in groups, recommended group size, 3 to 4. Max. 10 A4-pages per individual project. Max. 15 A4-pages for groups of 2-5 students. The grade award will take into account both the written paper and the oral performance. Internal second examiner.

Student may bring to the exam whatever they find helpful. Exam aids are likely to be more of a distraction than a help, however.