Companion Reading and Field Guide
A note from the author
No single book covers the full scope of leading IT in local government. The Leading Local Government IT book and field guide is a starting point, not the whole conversation. The works listed here are the ones I return to, recommend to new CIOs, and find useful when thinking through a hard problem on the job.
Some are recent. Some are decades old. The selection criterion is practical usefulness for the work, not novelty. I update this list quarterly as new books appear and as my own thinking shifts. If you have suggestions, send them to read@stevemonaghan.com.
This list is intentionally short. Reading widely matters more than reading exhaustively. Pick three or four titles that match where you are in your career right now, work them carefully, then come back for more.
A few examples from the Companion Reading list.
Shark, A. R. (2026). CIO Leadership for Cities and Counties: Emerging Trends and Practices (3rd ed.). Public Technology Institute.
The standard multi-author survey of the field. Thirty chapters from contributors across academia, practice, and the private sector cover the breadth of topics a public sector CIO encounters. Pairs naturally with HPG-IT’s single-voice practitioner framework: read Shark for breadth across topics, work HPG-IT for an integrated approach to leading the function. Both belong on the public sector CIO’s shelf.
Pahlka, J. (2023). Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. Metropolitan Books.
A clear, honest account of why government technology projects struggle and what changes when implementation is treated as a craft. The most important book on government delivery published in the last decade.
Lencioni, P. (2012). The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. Jossey-Bass.
The companion volume to Five Dysfunctions, written for executives. Organizational health as the source of sustained performance applies as cleanly in a county as in a Fortune 500.
Kim, D. H. (1999). Introduction to Systems Thinking. Pegasus Communications.
The clearest short introduction to systems thinking I have found. Kim’s iceberg model lays out three levels of perspective: events at the surface, patterns underneath, and systemic structures below those. It is the single most useful diagnostic tool I use in CIO work. When something keeps going wrong, the iceberg tells you where to look. Forty pages. Read it twice.
The Field Guide: Appendix A
The appendix is built to be used, not just read. The questions and tools in it only do their job when you sit down and work them, ideally with your leadership team in the room.
A printed book and a locked PDF don't let you do that. So here's the editable version. Print the section you need, add space for your answers, write in your own questions, and put it in front of your team. Mark it up. Make it fit your shop.
The book is fixed. The work isn't. This one's yours to change.
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