Education
Nolan received his Bachelor Production and Operations Research in 1962 from the University of Washington, where he also received his Master of Business Administration in 1963 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1966.
Nolan received his Bachelor Production and Operations Research in 1962 from the University of Washington, where he also received his Master of Business Administration in 1963 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1966.
Nolan 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. He was conferred a Doctor of Philosophy 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 Information Technology management, authoring some of the earliest systematic treatments of this topic (eg), which articulated the first application of a staged maturity model — the Stages-of-growth model — to the stages of growth of enterprise Information Technology. This model is sometimes incorrectly confused with the much later process capability maturity model - the CMM, which was defined approximately
10 years later by Watts Humphrey in his Capability Maturity Model.
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.