Six IS Leadership Roles

Six IS Leadership Roles
(Computer Science Corporation, 1996)

1. Chief architect. The chief architect designs future possibilities for the business. The primary work of the chief architect is to design and evolve the IT infrastructure so that it will expand the range of future possibilities for the business. The infrastructure should provide not just today's technical services, such as networking, databases and desktop operating systems, but an increasing range of business-level services, such as workflow, portfolio management, scheduling, and specific business components or objects.
2. Change leader. The change leader orchestrates resources to achieve optimal implementation of the future. The essential role of the change leader is to orchestrate all those resources that will be needed to execute the change program. This includes providing new IT tools, but it also involves putting in place teams of people who can redesign roles, jobs and workflow, who can change beliefs about the company and the work people do, and who understand human nature and can develop incentive systems to coax people into new and different behaviors.
3. Product developer. The product developer helps define the company’s place in the emerging digital economy. For example, a product developer might recognize the potential for performing key business processes over electronic linkages. The product developer must "sell" the idea to a business partner, and together they can set up and evaluate business experiments, which are initially operated out of IS. Whether the new methods are adopted or not, the company will learn from the experiments and so move closer to commercial success in emerging digital markets.
4. Technology provocateur. The technology provocateur embeds IT into the business strategy. The technology provocateur works with senior business executives to bring IT and realities of the IT marketplace to bear on the formation of strategy for the business. The technology provocateur is a senior business executive who understands both the business and IT at a deep enough level to integrate the two perspectives in discussions about the future course of the business. Technology provocateurs have a wealth of experience in IS disciplines, so they understand at a fundamental level the capabilities of IT and how IT impacts the business.
5. Coach. The coach teaches people to acquire the skill sets they will need for the future. Coaches have two basic responsibilities: teaching people how to learn, so that they can become self-sufficient, and providing team leaders with staff able to do the IT-related
work of the business. A mechanism that assists both is the centre of excellence - a small group of people with a particular competence or skill, with a coach responsible for their growth and development. Coaches are solid practitioners of the competence that they will be coaching, but need not be the best at it in the company.
6. Chief operating strategist. The chief operating strategist invents the future with senior management. The chief operating strategist is the top IS executive who is focused on the future agenda of the IS organization. The strategist has parallel responsibilities related to helping the business design the future, and then delivering it. The most important, and least understood, parts of the role have to do with the interpretation of new technologies and the IT marketplace, and the bringing of this understanding into the development of the digital business strategy for the organization.

MANAGERIAL ROLES
(Mintzberg,Henry)

Managers undertake activities to achieve the objectives of the organization. Mintzberg (1994) notes a number of different and sometimes conflicting views of the manager's role. He finds that it is a curiosity of the management literature that its best-known writers all seem to emphasize one particular part of the manager’s job to the exclusion of the others.
Describing the manager's work has been an ongoing pursuit of researchers and practitioners. The manager's work is characterized by brevity, variety, fragmentation of tasks, a preference for action (as opposed to reflection), and a preference for oral communication over formal reports (Mintzberg, 1994). Kotter (1999) identified two main roles for executives: agenda setting and network building.
A number of models describing the manager's work have been proposed including functional descriptions such as planning, organizing, directing, controlling, co-ordinating, and innovating. According to Mintzberg (1990), the manager's job can be described in terms of various roles:

1. Informational Roles.By virtue of interpersonal contacts, both with subordinates and with a network of contacts, the manager emerges as the nerve centre of the organizational
unit. The manager may not know everything but typically knows more than subordinates do. Processing information is a key part of the manager's job. As monitor, the manager is perpetually scanning the environment for information, interrogating liaison contacts and subordinates, and receiving unsolicited information, much of it as a result of the network of personal contacts. As a disseminator, the manager passes some privileged information
directly to subordinates, who would otherwise have no access to it. As spokesperson, the manager sends some information to people outside the unit.
2. Decisional Roles. Information is not an end in itself; it is the basic input to decision making. The manager plays the major role in a unit's decision-making system. As its formal authority, only the manager can commit the unit to important new courses of action; and as its nerve centre, only the manager has full and current information to make the set of decisions that determines the unit's strategy. As entrepreneur, the manager seeks to improve the unit, to adapt it to changing conditions in the environment. As disturbance handler, the manager responds to pressures from situations. As resource allocater, the manager is responsible for deciding who will get what. As negotiator, the manager commits organizational resources in real time.

3. Interpersonal Roles. As figurehead, every manager must perform some ceremonial duties. As leader, managers are responsible for the work of the people of their unit. As liaison, the manager makes contacts outside the vertical chain of command. Changes in both information technology and competition continue to change the role of the information systems executive.

References:

(http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol3/v3n2p31-39.pdf)