Business Computing:
the Second 50 Years

The Guildhall conference for business leaders

Speaker details

Professor Nolan earned his B.A. from the University of Washington in Production and Operations Research in 1962, and his M.B.A in 1963 and his Ph.D. in 1966. Professor Nolan returned to the faculty of Harvard Business School in 1991, after serving as Chairman of Nolan, Norton & Co. from 1977.

Professor Nolan is studying business transformation, the process of creatively destroying industrial economy management principles and evolving a set of workable management principles for the information economy. Some industrial economy management principles are obsolete, some salvageable, and entirely new principles are needed to guide, for example, the management of information

as a resource distinctively different from scarce, physical resources. Central to his research is an understanding of information technology's information resource management role in taking an enterprise from "make and sell" to "sense and respond" strategies. Nolan (with Stephan Haeckel) discussed the key ideas behind leveraging general management decisions through information technology in a Harvard Business Review article, Managing by Wire and in their Chapter 7 Managing by Wire: Using IT to Transform a Business from 'Make-and-Sell' to 'Sense-and-Respond', in Competing in the Information Age, Strategic Alignment in Practice, edited by Jerry N. Luftman and published by Oxford University Press in 1996. His article, along with F. Warren McFarlan, How to Manage an IT Outsourcing Alliance was published in the Sloan Management Review, Winter 1995. He co-authored, with David Croson, Creative Destruction: A Six-Stage Process for Transforming the Organization (HBS Press, 1995) and Reengineering the Organization, with Thomas Davenport, Donna L. Stoddard and Sirkka Jarvenpaa, (Harvard Business School Publishing. 1995). His latest book is Sense and Respond: Capturing Value in the Network Era, (HBS Press, 1998) edited with Stephen P. Bradley.

Professor Nolan has contributed a number of Harvard Business Review articles on the management of information technology. His latest contribution to the Harvard Business Review is the introduction to Connectivity and Control in the Year 2000 and Beyond July-August 1998 issue. He is the originator of the "Stages Theory," one of the most widely used management frameworks for information technology baselining and planning. He also has authored and co-authored a number of books, including Globalization, Technology and Competition (HBS Press, 1993) with Professor Stephen P. Bradley of the Harvard Business School and Professor Jerry A. Hausman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Building the Information Age Organization: Structure, Control, and Information Technologies (Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1994) with Professors James I. Cash, Robert G. Eccles, and Nitin Nohria. In addition, Professor Nolan is also a member of the Board of Directors for Novell, james martin + co, and Zefer.