IT Strategy (CIS 9000)

A Harvard case study that reads like a novel: a new CIO learns the job in real time, one crisis per chapter. IT strategy is a series of judgment calls, not a framework, and our hero Barton makes the judgment calls visible. I treat a portion of the course like a book club, where every week we read a chapter or two and discuss (some students say the book club is their favorite part of the course). The format – business lessons smuggled into a novel – is heavily inspired by The Goal.

Tiwana wrote the textbook for exactly this course's audience – managers who need to make IT decisions without becoming technologists. The chapters on governance and technical debt earn their spot. A strong contender to replace the textbook – maybe when a new edition comes out.

The novel-shaped version of everything that goes wrong when business strategy and IT operations don't talk. It nearly made the syllabus – it teaches DevOps more than strategy, but the dysfunction it describes is the reason this course exists. Similar structure to Adventures of an IT Leader and The Goal.

Blockbuster vs. Netflix is the IT strategy case – technology choices as company-level life and death. Dated in the best way: you know how it ends, so you can watch the decisions instead of the plot.

Not an IT book, but the strategy foundation underneath the course. Rumelt's kernel – diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action – is the tool I keep reaching for when a case discussion drifts into wishful thinking. A great pre-read for anyone who hasn't taken a graduate business strategy course yet, and highly recommended for anyone who learns best from in-class case discussions.

A business book disguised as a novel about a failing factory – the easiest pre-read on this page. The Theory of Constraints shows up everywhere in IT: find the bottleneck, and stop optimizing everything else. Arguably even more relevant today than when it was first written, with AI letting us treat everything like a factory.

One hundred short lessons you can read in an evening. If you're coming to the course without a business background, this is the fastest way to pick up the vocabulary.

How we got from autocomplete to agents that ship code, told by the people who built it. I'm folding the recent history of AI into the refreshed curriculum – this is the long version of that story.

The strongest version of the case that we should be scared. I don't buy all of it (some books are here because they're worth arguing with), but you should know this argument before you put AI in production, not after.

A technology strategy case for this decade: how Apple built the most sophisticated manufacturing operation on Earth, and what it cost strategically.

Grove on strategic inflection points – the moments when technology quietly rewrites your industry's rules. Every IT strategy case has one; Grove teaches you to see it coming.