IT Leadership: Balancing Competing Tensions in a Rapidly Digitizing World

In modern organizations, Information Technology (IT) leaders wear many hats. They are technicians responsible for overseeing specialized tools that organizations use to conduct operations, defenders protecting the organization from outside threats, teambuilders developing specialized talent to support organizational needs, strategists leveraging emerging technology to disrupt markets, and administrators overseeing large capital and operating budgets. Additionally, technology evolves rapidly such that IT leaders must frequently make decisions about products and approaches that have no generally accepted best practices, regarding topics where much of the publicly available information is produced by the providers of the very technology under consideration. The study of IT leadership provides unique value to the Information Systems (IS) discipline in three distinct ways. First, it can provide IT leaders with practical insights regarding emerging phenomena through analysis conducted by scholars without the conflicts of interest that are inherent in the information provided by vendors of IT products and services. Second, the study of IT leadership can conceptualize and address IS related questions and issues from the perspective of an administrative leader. Third, the study of IT leadership can help identify ways that IT leaders can grow, develop, and improve as business professionals. This monograph provides a summary of the extant research literature concerning IT leadership and the unique challenges that those professionals face.