Richard L. Nolan (born c. 1940) is an American business theorist, and Emeritus Professor of Business Administration at the
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...
.
Biography
Nolan received his BA Production and Operations Research in various positions, including the Philip Condit Chair of Management at
University of Washington
The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington.
Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...
and the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration emeritus at
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...
. 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.), which articulated the first application of a staged maturity model — the
Stages-of-growth model Stages-of-growth model is a theoretical model for the growth of information technology (IT) in a business or similar organization. It was developed by Richard L. Nolan during the early 1970s, and with the final version of the model published by him ...
— to the stages of growth of enterprise IT.
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 The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a development model created in 1986 after a study of data collected from organizations that contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense, who funded the research. The term "maturity" relates to the degree of ...
.
[
] 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.
See also
*
Stages-of-growth model Stages-of-growth model is a theoretical model for the growth of information technology (IT) in a business or similar organization. It was developed by Richard L. Nolan during the early 1970s, and with the final version of the model published by him ...
References
External links
Harvard Business School BiographyPublications
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nolan, Richard L.
1940s births
Year of birth uncertain
Living people
American business theorists
Harvard Business School faculty
University of Washington alumni
University of Washington faculty