Managing IT Change—The Business Leader's Role in IT Strategy Development

• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Author: Thomas R. Weirich,Art Worster,Frank Andera
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22209
• Date: 01 November 2016

69

© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22209

f

e

a

t

u

r

e

a

r

t

i

c

l

e

Managing IT Change—The

Business Leader’s Role in IT

Strategy Development

Art Worster, Thomas R. Weirich, and Frank Andera

With all of the

potential for

the use of

information technol-

ogy (IT) resources

to support business

operations (from

technical platforms

to applications), the

development of strat-

egy and acceptance

of developmental

and operating plans becomes

an issue that business leaders

simply cannot ignore. While

decades ago it was not only

possible but made sense to just

leave the strategy for the use

of IT in the hands of the IT

leadership (chief information

officer [CIO] or similar), this

is simply no longer the case.

The complexity of the endless

swarm of products on the mar-

ket to do virtually anything

you can think of with IT pro-

liferates every day. It makes it

more difficult to work through

which products will do the

best job for the business. This

has become a perfect place for

management accountants to

be involved in gathering infor-

mation and estimating, along

with operations managers,

what the potential returns will

be for each example suggested.

First, it is important to break

“IT” down into four differ-

ent categories and to discuss

the relationship between IT

and business leaders for each.

One must recognize

some of these dif-

ferences to clarify

what these business

relationships entail.

After this, we will

spend most of this

article talking about

the dynamics of IT

change and how

these affect business

strategies as well as

financial predictions. The fol-

lowing subsections of IT will

be discussed separately:

1. Technical infrastructure.

Included in this are network

architecture, server (or

mainframe) operations, data

center equipment refresh-

ment programs, and so on.

2. Strategic business sourc-

ing. Outsourcing of tech-

nical infrastructure or

applications, use of cloud

platforms, security, deploy-

ment of device connectivity

(known as the Internet of

Things [IoT]), or in-house

operations.

This article is a continuation of the series focusing

on managing IT change in an organization. Specifi-

cally, this article highlights the business leader’s

role, including the management accountant, in

IT strategy development. The authors dissect IT

strategy into various components and present the

role of a business leader in the development and

execution of IT strategy. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This is the eighth installment in a series of

articles that have appeared and will appear

in the coming issues of JCAF. Art Worster

and his associates, Thomas R. Weirich and

Frank Andera, address matters that arise

during and after the implementation of

integrated IT applications in a business.

Editorial Review