The Adventures of an IT Leader

In January of 2003, F. Warren McFarlan and Robert D. Austin of Harvard Business School wrote a great case study about the CareGroup Network Outage.

One of my blog readers, Brian Ahier, suggested that I read the new book by one of the same authors, Robert D. Austin, called "The Adventures of an IT Leader" .

From the HBS website:

"Becoming an effective IT manager presents a host of challenges–from anticipating emerging technology to managing relationships with vendors, employees, and other managers. A good IT manager must also be a strong business leader.

This book invites you to accompany new CIO Jim Barton to better understand the role of IT in your organization. You’ll see Jim struggle through a challenging first year, handling (and fumbling) situations that, although fictional, are based on true events.

You can read this book from beginning to end, or treat is as a series of cases. You can also skip around to address your most pressing needs. For example, need to learn about crisis management and security? Read chapters 10-12. You can formulate your own responses to a CIO’s obstacles by reading the authors’ regular 'reflection' questions.

You’ll turn to this book many times as you face IT-related issues in your own career."

Imagine my surprise when I turned to page 48, where the main character Jim Barton is listening to the radio and hears a mini-biography about "a critical care physician who still took his turn in the ER; PhD from MIT in bioinformatics; former entrepreneur who had started, grown, and sold a company while in medical school; and former student of a Nobel Prize winning economist. He was the author of four books on computer programming and had written the first version of many of the hospital's software applications. This CIO earned kudos for his transparency during a network crisis...."

Thanks to Robert Austin for my first appearance in a "novel"!

It's a great book with many practical suggestions about IT leadership, governance, and budget allocation.

In the spirit of the book's Chapter 4 on budgeting, I'm sharing the document I used last week to justify my FY10 capital budget. I always present a narrative written in non-technical terms which supplements my budget spreadsheets by highlighting quality, safety, return on investment and strategic alignment. I hope you'll find the format useful for defending your own capital budgets.

When presenting my operating budget, I use benchmarks from HIMSS, the American Hospital Association, and the Association of American Medical Colleges. I benchmark growth of the entire organization and the growth of IT. Currently the IT organization is 1.78% of the BIDMC operating budget. BIDMC has grown by 38% over the past 5 yeas, but IT staffing has stayed constant, supporting growth in demands and technological complexity by working harder and smarter. IT is lean and mean. In tough budget times, presenting data rather than emotion is the best way to objectively justify a budget.