|
About Peter Keen (Current as of February, 2008)
Table of Contents:
Biographic Profile
Peter Keen is a
professor, adviser to senior management in business and government
organizations, author, executive educator, and public speaker. He lives his
professional and personal life very globally. In the past three
years, he has worked in Mexico, Slovenia, Canada, Germany, The
Netherlands, Spain, Finland, Denmark, Abu Dhabi, Indonesia, Poland, the United States, Great Britain,
France, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, China, Singapore, and Trinidad. One of
his main interests is "hidden jewels", cities and reasons that lie outside the
mainstream of global business but that have distinctive strengths in the global
search for talent. These "cities of knowledge" are becoming integral to global
business innovation and social development.
Peter's work is driven by the question of "What's on the 1-5 year horizon --
business, organizational, social and technological -- that signals a demand for
mobilizing now to be positioned to take charge of change rather
than be pushed to react to it. Increasingly, the need for transformation and a
recasting of business models is driven by the shifts in value-creation fueled by
the combination of global deregulation and trade liberalization, coordination
(rather than just Information) technology, and the standardization of interfaces
between product components and processes. This leads to the Commodity Trap where
companies lose pricing power and differentiation and face a flood of
overcapacity and aggressive new competition. The issue then is not whether to
innovate but how. Peter and his colleagues hav been working to provide practical
answers. Highlights of their frameworks and management tools are Knowledge
Fusion and Knowledge Networking blueprints and the Transformation-Cube approach
to reconfiguring the organization, with sourcing of new capabilities a central
element that is very different in its innovation impacts from standard
outsourcing.
Many of these are products of valued and creative relationships, with
professors and practitioners, including Mark McDonald, Jajda Qureshi, Margaret
Tan, Ronald Williams, and Craigg Ballance. Peter's mode of development is to
collaborate closely with a number of leading thinkers and practitioners to
evolve and test new ideas and frameworks in articles, public speaking and
university and company executive education programs, and then to extend and
apply them in the real-world labs of his longer-term consulting
relationships. Books are the synthesis of the results.
His primary area of experience and expertise has long been the links between
information technology and organizational innovation, a theme that he continues
to expand on in his ongoing research and practice. He has published a number of
books on these topics over the past thirty years, that have all been widely
cited for their practical thought leadership, beginning with Decision Support
Systems: An Organizational Perspective (1978), Competing in Time: Using
Telecommunications for Competitive Advantage (1988), Shaping the Future:
Business Design through Information Technology (1992), From .Com to
.Profit, and The Freedom Economy: Gaining the Mobile Commerce Edge
(2001), and Rehearsing the Future: Building Decision Agility (2008).
This work all has an organizational and business focus, as illustrated by
other books such as The Process Edge: Creating Vaue Where it Counts
(1997) and Tthe e-Process Edge (2001), Electronic Commerce
Relationships: Trust by Design (1999), and a series of more recent academic
papers and book chapters that explore what is perhaps the greatest single challenge facing
organizations everywhere: Knowledge Mobilization and real collaboration, rather
than just good intentions. Examples of papers published over the past two years are: Activating Knowledge Through Electronic Collaboration (Co-authored with Prof.
Sajda Qreshi), Knowledge Mobilization: Knowledge Fusion: a Framework for
Extending the Rigor and Relevance of Knowledge Management (with Prof. Margaret
Tan) , Moving from Digital to Digitally-enabled: Positioning Cities and Regions to
Compete in the Globally-connected Economy (With Professor Tan), Re-Sourcing the Business: How Companies Create and Sustain Growth and Profits
in the Era of Commoditization (with Ronald Williams), Organizational Transformation Through Business Models (with
Prof. Qureshi)
His most recent work expands this focus to address the challenges of value
creation in the customer-driven, globally-connected economy.
Background and Education:
Peter was born in Singapore and brought up in England. He has lived in the
United States since 1967. He received his bachelor’s degree in English
Literature from Oxford University, where he won the Shelley-Mills Prize for original research on
Shakespeare’s King Lear. He obtained his masters and doctoral degrees from the
Harvard Business School, where his research focused on intuition as a strategy,
not a hunch.
He has received honorary doctoral degrees from Marist College and the
University of Abo, Finland, for his contribution to research, education and
management theory and practice.
Academic positions:
Peter Keen has held full-time faculty positions at Harvard, MIT,
Stanford University and the Technical University of Delft, with
Visiting Professorships at Wharton, Duke, The University of
Stockholm, Fordham, Oxford University, the
London Business School and, as The Shaw Foundation Professor in
Digital Media, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His
professorial positions have been broad, including Organizational
Behavior, Management Information Systems and Corporate Strategy.
He has been the co-founder of a number of leading conferences and
journals in the information systems field and is a member of the
Advisory and Editorial Boards for many international journals.
Books and articles:
Peter is the author of more than twenty books and several hundred
articles and book chapters.
 The
main themes are:
- Innovation in the customer-driven, globally-connected economy: recasting
business models, escaping the Commodity trap, reconfiguring and re-sourcing
capabilities, restructuring the financial dynamics of business
- A top management perspective on IT as a business and organizational
resource: the new impacts of technology on industry composition, competition
and the customer experience:
- Knowledge mobilization: the demand side of knowledge and collaboration
versus the supply side of information management
- The six faces of the Transformation Cube: Branding the Customer
Experience, and Financial, Human Capital, Technology, Physical and
Capability Sourcing Blueprints
- Gaining the coordination edge; the historical core of business success.
- Mobile commerce; the global business and social revolutions
CIO Magazine identified his Every
Manager’s Guide to Information Technology as one of the ten most
influential books on IT of the 1990s. Most of his books have been published in
many foreign language editions, including Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German,
and Portuguese.
Consulting:
Peter Keen builds his consulting activities around advisory
relationships that focus on helping clients make major step shifts
in their innovation by drawing on but not relying on IT. More and
more of this work is international, with clients in Europe, Central
and South America, and Asia. He also works closely as a personal
adviser to CIOs to help them take on new roles in their contorbuton
to business innovation. Organizations with
 whom
he has worked at senior management levels in long-term
relationships include Citibank, The Royal Bank of Canada, Unilever,
Sweden Post, Cemex (Mexico), The U.S. General Accounting Office,
British Airways, CTC (Chile), IBM, HP, Ford of Europe, British
Petroleum, and Glaxo.
Keen Innovations maintains a small office in Mexico and Singapore; he works
closely with business and academic colleagues in both countries and is expanding
the scope and content areas of the consulting projects this collaboration
undertakes. Work over the past year has included change management,
international organizational development, strategies for attracting foreign
investment, and IT infrastructure planning for public and private sector
organizations in Mexico, South East Asia, China, and Singapore.
Public speaking:
Peter Keen is a frequent keynote speaker at public events. He works closely
with clients to ensure that his material meshes well with their purposes for the
event and, where relevant He is increasingly active in international
forums and over the past two years has made presentations in around a dozen
countries. He is particularly active in working in Asia's smaller economies as
well as the twin giants of China and India.
Executive education:
One of Peter Keen’s strong interests and commitments has long been to innovative executive
education. He works with individual companies and
 universities to design and
deliver customized programs that define the agenda for action in building and deploying
new capabilities for innovation and organizational and competitive advantage. Clients for whom he
has carried out long-term executive programs include Hitachi, IBM, Citicorp,
Royal Bank of Canada, The World Bank, British Airways, Sweden Post, and many of
the world’s leading telecommunications and high tech companies. He is a frequent
guest lecturer in university programs, with one current focus being on building the new generation of
IT leaders who understand the dynamic relationships between IT and business and
organizational innovation and in building a new business-IT dialog.
Personal interests:
Peter is a devoted (and now joyous) member of the
Red Sox nation. He
and his wife, Sherry, share a passionate interest in
 wild life and are frequent
visitors to nature preserves in South Africa, Australia and other havens. He
reads widely and constantly, with his main interests being history, the exotic
areas of science, poetry, Shakespeare studies, science fiction, intellectual thrillers and general fiction.
Among his idiosyncrasies are collecting antique Egyptian stamps and seashells.
He plays chess aggressively and not very well. One of his remaining ambitions is
to win the prize for solving the London Times weekly crossword puzzle
competition.
One of his strongest side interests is in teas, of which there are 3,000. He
has written a book on Great Teas for Everyday Pleasure (2007).
Information and extracts are available on peterkeengreatteas.com |
|