Harris Kern

A world-renowned American author, publisher, lecturer, and IT consultant, who is the industry’s leading mind on simplifying IT – and making it work. In a ‘technology-solves-all-problems-world’, Mr. Kern challenges industry leaders to build the ideal IT organization by re-focusing resources, rather than re-building infrastructures. His focus is on organization, people, processes and key methodologies, which allow organizations to maximize the ability of IT to create business value and enables the integration of IT into the business as a strategic partner instead of a back-office support department. His services assist customers with identifying, measuring and improving information technology’s contribution to the business by enabling organizations to align behaviors, processes and technologies along value chains to achieve desired outcomes.

Mr. Kern’s extensive industry background serves as the foundation for his best-selling series of books published by Prentice Hall. As executive editor of the Harris Kern Enterprise Computing Institute, he has brought together the industry’s leading minds to publish “how-to” textbooks on the critical issues the IT industry faces. The series includes titles such as: IT Services, IT Organization, IT Systems Management, High Availability, CIO Wisdom, Managing IT as an Investment, among others. Mr. Kern’s career has brought him in contact with the best and brightest of the IT industry.

In 1988 Mr. Kern was hired by Sun, his initial challenge was to lead the effort to design and develop the tools, address the organization, people and process issues to support Sun’s first 24/7 UNIX production environment, while maintaining their legacy environment and existing personnel. He successfully transitioned Sun’s mission critical systems from a mainframe environment to a UNIX client/server environment. Prior to joining Sun, Mr. Kern was responsible for Fujitsu’s worldwide infrastructure and spent 10 years at GTE, Inc. as a Senior Systems Programmer and Technical Support Manager.

Mr. Kern is also an American motivational speaker, peak performance expert, trainer and self-discipline mentor. He is the author of DISCIPLINE: Six Steps To Unleashing Your Hidden Potential and DISCIPLINE: Training The Mind To Manage Your Life Mr. Kern has designed the first Discipline Mentoring Program to help people achieve their goals by being there to help them follow-through.