Reinventing the Is Organization: Evolution and Revolution in It Management Practices

Competitive environments and sophisticated technologies are presenting IS executives with new opportunities and pressures, encouraging many to consider new IS management practices. This paper describes a study of fifty executives' new management practices and the reasons they were implemented. The findings suggest that IS executives are most concerned with delivering business value, but they believe that delivering business value requires attention to five other concerns: the technical infrastructure, the staff infrastructure, productivity, cycle time, and partnership. Executives are making both evolutionary and revolutionary changes in their management practices as they attempt to address multiple objectives simultaneously. The executives' concerns are summarized in a proposed model of IT management that demonstrates the complex interrelationships between objectives and practices. This research was sponsored by the Advanced Practices Council of SIM International. A related paper was published in the Proceedings of the 1993 Pan Pacific Conference on Information Systems, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC, May 1993, pages 193-199. The authors thank Judith Quillard for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This is a working paper. Please do not cite or reproduce without permission of the authors.