Richard L. Nolan

Richard L. Nolan is an American business school professor. He has held various positions, including the Philip Condit Chair of Management at University of Washington and the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration emeritus at Harvard Business School. A founder of consulting firm Nolan, Norton & Co. (acquired by KPMG), he contributed a great deal to the thinking on the role of IT (Information Technology) in transforming organisations and markets. He was conferred a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Washington, although little of his work involves formal mathematical modeling.

Professor Nolan pioneered research and thinking on the topic of large scale IT management, authoring some of the earliest systematic treatments of this topic (e.g. [Nolan, Richard, 1974, 1982. "Managing the Data Resource Function." St. Paul, Minnesota, West Publishing. ISBN 0829900039 (1982 ed.)] ), which articulated the first application of a staged maturity model — the Stages-of-growth model — to the stages of growth of enterprise IT. [cite journal
last = Nolan
first = Richard
authorlink =
coauthors =
title = Managing the computer resource: a stage hypothesis
journal = Communications of the ACM
volume=16
issue = 7
publisher = Association for Computing Machinery
date= July, 1973
url = http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362284
format =
pages = 399-405
doi = ]

This model is sometimes incorrectly confused with the much later "process" capability maturity model - the CMM, which was defined approx. 10 years later by Watts Humphrey in his Capability Maturity Model [cite journal
last = Nolan
first = Richard
authorlink =
coauthors =
title = Managing the computer resource: a stage hypothesis
journal = Communications of the ACM
volume=16
issue = 7
publisher = Association for Computing Machinery
date= July, 1973
url = http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362284
format = 399 – 405
pages =
doi =
accessdate = 2007-07-27] . Professor Nolan also collaborated with F. Warren McFarlan on a number of influential papers.

His 1995 Harvard Business School press book Creative Destruction: A Six-Stage Process for Transforming the Organization (with David C. Croson) heralded many of the organizational issues of the Internet age and sold over 15,000 copies in six languages.

Areas of research

* Stages-of-growth model

References

External links

* [http://dor.hbs.edu/fit/fi_redirect.jhtml?facInfo=bio&facEmId=rnolan Harvard Business School Biography]
* [http://dor.hbs.edu/fi_redirect.jhtml?facInfo=pub&facEmId=rnolan&loc=extn Publications]