22. Leadership and Information Technology

The ubiquitousness of Information Technology requires that leaders of organizations in almost all industries have a good deal of knowledge of what Information Technology (IT) can do for their organizations. In every industry IT is making its presence felt in a big way. For organizational leaders the knowledge of how IT is impacting the industry and, in turn, their organizations would allow them to incorporate IT into their organizational DNA. Doing this the right way may, in fact, be the central requirement for the continued existence of organizations into the future. For the sake of focus, our discussion in this chapter will concentrate on business organizations. The arguments we present could, with minor modifications, apply to other types of organizations too. In this chapter, first, we discuss how IT can augment and help various kinds of businesses within their competitive landscape. Two, we will discuss how IT is increasingly getting inextricably woven into business processes and its implications on organizational dynamics. Third, we will discuss deployment of IT and the questions to consider while making the decision on internal expertise versus externally hired services. Fourth, we will discuss how to implement IT systems. Following implementation, in the fifth section, we will discuss how day-to-day operational issues should be taken care of in a manner that delivers expected results. Sixth, we will end the chapter with a discussion on how leaders should be thinking of IT in the current times.