OVERVIEW
The Leadership for a Networked World (LNW) program Leadership and Strategic Management for Chief Information Officers (LSM) is designed primarily for the CIO leading an organization’s technology portfolio. LSM focuses on how these senior-most executives shape and implement strategies in the public sector, including the concepts and skills needed for leadership within a single organization and across multiple organizations.
In the public sector, success requires alignment between organizational capacity, public value, and the authorizing environment. Leaders must thus become wise and skillful as managers (to build and utilize organizational capacity), as analysts (to assess public needs and the creation of public value), and as advocates (to mobilize support and legitimacy). Working with Harvard faculty and utilizing cases, concepts, and research of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, participants will gain insight into challenges including:
- How can I contribute to building and using organizational capacity? How can I assess and respond to the strengths and weaknesses of our infrastructure, work processes, staff skills and culture, institutional authority, and other assets? How can I help assess and possibly redesign external partnerships and relationships between core and support activities? To what extent have we and should we move toward "shared service" models of production? What is our distinctive competence, and how might it best be utilized?
- How can I contribute to our understanding of public problems and the creation of public value? What are the major social problems and trends where we are or could be exerting influence? What data and analysis can supply feedback needed to guide our investments and operations? What are the groups with a stake in our work, and what are the issues of efficiency, equity, and legitimacy to be resolved among these groups? To what extent and how should we embrace transparency, accountability, and digital democracy?
- How can I contribute our mobilization of support and authorization? How can I work with the other members of the senior team to assemble the staff, budgets, legislative, and other support we need? How can we engage with and monitor our authorizing environment to form or adjust our mission? How can we cultivate support to balance needs for control against the growing imperatives for innovation?
- As a team, how can our senior group work together to make and implement smart choices? Most CIOs have worked primarily in technical environments, where problems tend to have right or wrong answers (the software either runs or crashes). For the senior leadership team, however, problems clearly require careful, evidence-based analysis, but the "right" answers are almost never so objectively verified. Leadership and governance is about negotiated solutions to complex and controversial problems. For those with technology backgrounds to work well with the senior team, they typically need to become comfortable with a broader range of analytic and communications tools and decisions.
The goal of the Leadership and Strategic Management session is to develop capabilities for working with other senior leaders in shaping and implementing public sector strategies. This is a course that taps deeply into the core competencies of Harvard Kennedy School cases and research. With faculty and practitioners working together, LSM creates a learning environment where proven frameworks and real-world experience can be combined to create applications of immediate and long-lasting value.
About the Leadership for a Networked World Program
The Leadership for a Networked World (LNW) program helps leaders to understand and respond to the next wave of innovation and change being driven by digital information and networked organizational models. Founded in 1987 by Dr. Jerry Mechling, the LNW Program taps diverse knowledge within the Harvard community for uniquely powerful executive education, research, and teaching cases and publications. Current efforts are focused on the “cross-boundary” challenge of changes operating across traditional organizational boundaries – departments, jurisdictions, branches of government, and sectors of the economy. Cross-boundary reforms represent the next wave of the enormous opportunities and challenges opened up by information technology and networked organizational models.
Leading successfully in this networked world requires elected officials, general managers, and technology managers to collectively make difficult decisions and choices about the level and pace of reform and change. By bringing together leading practitioners, academics, and executives to share ideas and learn about governance, the LNW Program strives to deliver lasting public value for pressing challenges.
