Cyrus F. Gibson, PhD

Initiative on the Digital Economy
MIT Sloan

Dr. Gibson is an independent consultant in IT strategy, IT management, and IT-enabled business transformational change, with a particular current engagement with the Center for the Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School. His work has spanned over thirty years in academia and consulting.

Prior to his current position Dr. Gibson was a Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School, where he taught IT-business management and field research seminars to undergraduates, MBA’s and executive students and was involved in research on IT-enabled change management. He worked with the Center for Information Systems Research with particular responsibilities for sponsor relationship management.

Until 1996 Dr. Gibson was a senior vice president at CSC Index, a management consulting firm in reengineering and information systems management, where he had been since 1978. Prior to that he was an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, where he taught in MBA and executive programs in organizational behavior and IT management and conducted research on organizational and behavioral change in relation to the implementation of information systems.

Dr. Gibson’s publications include the books, The Information Imperative (with Barbara Jackson), 1987, and Managing Organizational Behavior, 1980, and over twenty articles, including, “Managing the Four Stages of EDP Growth” (with Richard Nolan), Harvard Business Review, which set a pattern for subsequent research and management practice in the field of IT management, and "IT-enabled Business Change: An Approach to Understanding and Managing Risk", MIS Quarterly Executive Vol 2 No 2, Sept 2003. He has written over twenty-five case studies, with recent particular emphasis on the management of large scale IT-related change.

He holds a PhD from the Sloan School, MIT, an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and a BE from Yale. He is a member of the Advisory Board of ICEX, Inc., a knowledge management services firm, and the Advisory Board of PleniaLocatel, a retail medical products firm. He has served on the Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Board of Directors of the Squam Lakes Association in New Hampshire, and has participated in several other volunteer organizations related to conservation and preservation.

Dr. Gibson and his wife Joanne live in Concord, Massachusetts. They have three grown children and nine grandchildren. He enjoys hiking, birding, sculling, tennis, and reading.