A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

Mark Schwartz

$24.99

Publication Date: October 2nd, 2017

Publisher:

It Revolution Press

ISBN:

9781942788119

Pages:

313

Description

"Mark shows the steps needed to break free of these challenges and unlock potential, speed, and growth. His advice is pragmatic, practical, and to the point." --Barry O'Reilly, author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise

"As Mark Schwartz points out in his compelling new book, A Seat at the Table, when CIOs re-conceptualize their role based on Agile principles, they will stop worrying about having a seat at the table, and start realizing all of the full potential of IT." --Martha Heller, author of Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT

Agile, Lean, and DevOps approaches are radical game changers, providing a fundamentally different way to think about how IT fits into the enterprise, how IT leaders lead, and how IT can harness technology to accomplish the objectives of the enterprise. But honest and open conversations are not taking place between management and Agile delivery teams.

In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be--an integral part of the value creation engine. With an easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous--to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table. CIOs, step on up, your seat at the table is waiting for you.

"Mark Schwartz's A Seat at the Table will be one of the most important books on technology and business leadership of our generation." --Gene Kim, bestselling author of The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project

About the Author

Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his extensive CIO wisdom to advise the world's largest companies on the obvious: time to move to the cloud, guys. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, change leadership, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile practices in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master's in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or just confused and much poorer. Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value, which - he is proud to report - has been labeled by his detractors "The Ecclesiastes of Product Management," and "Apocryphal." The book takes readers on a journey through the meaning of bureaucracy, the nature of cultural change, and the return on investment of an MBA degree, on the way to solving the great mystery ... what exactly do we mean by business value and how should that affect the way we practice IT? He promises that A Seat at the Table is more canonical and less apocryphal. Mark is the winner of a Computerworld Premier 100 award, an Amazon Elite 100 award, a Federal Computer Week Fed 100 award, and a CIO Magazine CIO 100 award, which strongly suggests that there are less than 99 other authors you could better spend time reading.