IN SEARCH OF EUROPE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LEADERS - REVIEW OF METHODS AND EMPIRICAL-EVIDENCE

information technology (IT) leaders - companies that successfully expl oit IT to achieve business results - generate immense interest among p ractitioners and academics. From a practitioner's perspective, IT lead ers provide benchmarks of leading IT management practices which others may emulate to achieve success. From an academic perspective, IT lead ers provide the 'data' for the creation of frameworks and theories of IT management. While US IT leaders are regularly assessed by academics , trade magazines, consultants and benchmarking firms, there has been no Europe-wide assessment of IT leadership. This neglect is detrimenta l to European IT practitioners and academics who may discover that Ame rican IT management practices are not transferrable in the European co ntext. In this article, we analyse the construct, context and statisti cal validity of six methods for identifying European IT leaders. Based on this analysis, two methods (expert ratings and citation counts) we re used to generate a preliminary list of European IT leaders and lagg ards. While individual experts were reticent about volunteering their ratings, their collective view appears to generate a worthwhile list w ith high construct validity. Citation counts represent a more accessib le process for list generation, with high statistical validity. Howeve r, an attempt to correlate expert ratings with a list based on citatio n counts confirms that the latter has questionable construct validity.