Advisory Board

Rob Austin

Robert D. Austin Rob Austin has been a professor at the Harvard Business School since 1997, where he has taught subjects such as economics, financial reporting, IT, and operations management to MBAs and executives. He chairs the school's executive program targeted at Chief Information Officers and teaches the IT module in the program for owner managers. Currently, he serves on the advisory boards or boards of directors of several IT industry firms, and he advises major corporations worldwide.

Dr. Austin has served as a senior executive in a new business created by a major technology company, and, prior to joining the Harvard faculty served as a technology manager at the Ford Motor Company. In his time with Ford, he developed, installed, and supported IT applications and infrastructure in a variety of businesses, including aftersales service, parts operations, consumer credit, vehicle assembly, and technical support.

Dr. Austin's research focuses on IT management and more generally on management of knowledge-intensive activities. He is the author of four books: Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations; Creating Business Advantage in the Information Age (coauthored with Lynda Applegate and Warren McFarlan); Corporate Information Strategy and Management (also coauthored with Applegate and McFarlan); and Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (coauthored with Lee Devin). His next book, about the telecoms industry, co-edited with Professor Stephen Bradley and tentatively titled The Broadband Explosion, will be published by Harvard Business School Press.

Dr. Austin earned his doctorate in management and decision sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation received the Herbert A. Simon Award. He holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from Northwestern University and bachelor's degrees in engineering and English literature from Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi.

Richard L. Nolan

Richard (Dick) Nolan serves as the Philip M. Condit endowed Chair in Business Administration at the University of Washington's School of Business, where he is evolving a set of workable management principles for the information economy. Prior to joining the UW faculty, Dr. Nolan was the William Barclay Harding Professor of Management of Technology at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Nolan served as Chairman and CEO of Nolan, Norton and Company, an information technology management consulting company, from 1977 until 1987, when the company was acquired by KPMG. After the acquisition, Dr. Nolan served as Chairman of Nolan, Norton and Company and Partner of KPMG until 1991.

Dr. Nolan is the originator of the "Stages Theory," one of the most widely used management frameworks for IT baselining and planning. He also has authored and coauthored a number of books, including Globalization, Technology and Competition; Building the Information Age Organization: Structure, Control, and Information Technologies; and Dot Vertigo.

Dr. Nolan is also a member of the Board of Directors for Novell and Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea.