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PETER KEEN
NOTED FUTURIST
Peter Keen is the founder and Chairman of Keen Innovations (formerly known as The International Center for Information Technologies). He has served on the faculties of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, with visiting positions at Wharton, Oxford, Fordham, the London Business School, Stockholm University and Duke University. In 1994, he was profiled by Forbes magazine as the “consultant from Paradise.” In 1988, he was named by Information Week as one of the top ten consultants in the information technology field.
His research, writing, education and public speaking all focus on helping firms make a management difference in their deployment of information technology as a business resource and on bridging the gap in understanding, language and planning between business decisions and technology choices. When all leading firms in an industry have access to the same technology, the competitive edge comes from fusing people, process and technology. The management challenge is for business managers to lead IT, without having to know the details of the technology but understanding and enacting the key decisions about policy, infrastructures and funding that enable their technical professionals to design, implement and operate the platform. That integrated platform is an essential base for business innovation in just about every industry today and vital for coordinating operations in a global environment.
A prolific writer, Peter Keen is the author of many books that have strongly influenced the business-technology dialogue, starting with Decision Support Systems (1978), that introduced in the early 1970s the concept of IT as a support to managerial judgment, Competing in Time: Using Telecommunications for Competitive Advantage (1986), the first book to anticipate the immense impact of telecommunications on the basics of business, and Shaping the Future: Business Design Through Information Technology (1991), a book addressed to senior executives that has been translated into many European and Asian languages. His Every Manager’s Guide to Information Technology (1995), now in a second edition, and Every Manager’s Guide to Business Processes (1995), provide business managers with a succinct overview of key concepts and terms. Every Manager’s Guide to Business Multimedia and Online Profits: A Manager’s Guide to Electronic Commerce were published in October 1997 and The Business Internet in 1998.
The Process Edge: Creating Value Where It Counts (1997) looks at business processes as invisible financial assets and liabilities to be managed as a portfolio of capital investments targeted at increasing shareholder value. He has worked as a consultant on a long-term basis as an adviser to top managers in helping them fuse business choices and technology decisions. Examples of companies with which Keen has worked in this mode include: British Airways, British Telecom, Citibank, Glaxo, IBM, MCI Communications, Royal Bank Of Canada, Cemex (Mexico), Sweden Post, Unilever, World Bank, IATA, CTC (Chile), and many others. His work with these companies has generally included the development and delivery of senior management education programs for action (rather than just “awareness”) as a lever for taking charge of change and making IT part of everyday planning and management thinking.
