Public leaders and institutions play a critical role in society's most important and difficult problems: defense, physical and economic security, social harmony, and legitimacy in resolving controversial issues of governance. While they typically spend most of their time using existing authority to manage previously developed routines, their most critical choices involve innovation: developing new ways to create value, often in response to newly emerging needs.

The Leadership for a Networked World (LNW) program Innovation through IT for Senior Leaders in Government helps leaders navigate the challenges and opportunities raised by digital information and networks. 

Successful leaders know that the innovations being enabled by information technology are too complex and strategically important to be safely delegated to specialists. With citizens demanding service 24 hours per day, with economic and political pressures requiring the redesign and reallocation of production responsibilities for healthcare, education, and homeland security, and with the well-demonstrated power of a "world is flat" environment for sourcing anywhere, innovation-oriented leadership has become essential for institutional and societal responsiveness and survival.

The ITSL program recognizes that leaders don't need to become technologists in order to succeed within this dynamic context; they do, however, need to master a set of concepts and frameworks for assessing the public value of and the risks involved with innovation. ITSL is structured to provide needed insights and guidance for responding to the challenges of IT-enabled innovation.

The overarching goal of ITSL is developing skills for understanding, embracing, and leading IT-enabled innovation. The course is not intended to train CIOs, and it requires no technical background. ITSL  is not about hardware, software, or networks; it's about the impact of IT-enabled innovation. Most importantly, it explores what leaders and senior managers need to do to ensure that an IT and innovation strategy maximizes public value.

Working with Harvard faculty and researchers, participants will explore the challenges and opportunities of IT-enabled innovation, including:

• The creation of public value through IT and network-enabled innovation.
  
  ITSL  will explore how innovation works in government settings and why -- despite the importance of innovation -- few organizations have mastered the ability to identify, create, and exploit its value on a systematic basis.  We will explore how and why investments in information technology have often failed and yet, on average, have also become the most significant contributors to recent and dramatic productivity growth. We will assess issues of equity and the distribution of value across groups based on income, race, ethnicity, geography, language, and other determinants of identity and community. We will analyze the impact of digital innovations on governmental transparency, accountability, and legitimacy. 
  
• The adoption and implementation of emerging trends and technology.
  
  ITSL  will help participants develop a pragmatic understanding of the choices senior leaders make in understanding technology-based capabilities and their readiness for adoption. While it is clear that the capabilities of digital data, digital processing, and digital communications are growing explosively, the course will also make clear the strategies leaders and institutions can use in keeping up with these capacities. A key theme will be developing the leadership needed to work effectively with technology specialists and to pace innovation and change within environments of high uncertainty. 
  
• The creation of new organizational models and divisions of labor.
  
  ITSL will strengthen participants’ ability to identify better processes for products and services and to connect with strategic partners and clients. Lessons will come from cases analyzing how governments such as Canada, Iowa, New York City, Singapore, and various agencies of the U.S. federal government have developed multiple new services, processes, and institutions. Services are in the process of becoming remote, asynchronous, fundamentally redesigned, and outsourced. As work changes, we face critical needs for government innovation and for leaders to be active, adaptive, and partner-oriented in managing the inevitable change and risks involved.