Peter Keen works as an independent consultant at senior levels of public and
private organizations. His focus is on helping organizations fuse business
strategy, organizational processes and information technology to create
innovation and growth. The assignments he undertakes are typically of five
kinds:
- Assess the client organization’s use of IT, in terms of
contribution
to competitive and organizational priorities, the architectures needed to
support synchronization of complex processes, inter-organizational
relationships, and business agility, and – perhaps most important of all –
evaluating in concrete, realistic and specific terms the financial payoff from
IT investments and opportunities.
- Identify major growth and innovation opportunities where IT can
provide a sustainable competitive edge plus new business services; in a
world of increasing commoditization and global sourcing of capabilities, more
and more sustainable advantages reflect a process edge that is built on
enterprise coordination designs.
- Help build next generation IT leadership. A current fad is that
IT doesn’t matter and hence by implication IT leadership also doesn’t matter.
In practice, the leadership IT agenda grows ever more important and urgent
because of the growing fusion of business and IT, the complexities of sourcing
capabilities, the multiplicity of relationships involved in building value
webs, and the nature of IT-related risks – business, organizational and
economic as well as technical.
- Develop strategies for global coordination of processes and
capabilities: outsourcing is in many ways a misnomer and thinking in terms
of it as getting rid of something almost guarantees disappointment. Instead,
organizations need to think in terms
of
co-sourcing via win-win relationships and insourcing capabilities. The
traditional organizational value chain of in-house resources and limited
supplier contracts is obsolete; the effective organization is now a value web
of multiple relationships tightly coupled through IT.
- Help set
the Boardroom agenda for an IT-mediated world. The effectiveness of
IT as a business resource has always depended on a small number of top
management policy decisions that ensure coordination and integration. Most of
these have centered around technology architectures. Now, they increasingly
center on enterprise coordination designs – the blueprints that enable
organizations to build a coordination edge in a commodity world.
Peter prefers to work on short studies with focused deliverables, that
produce focused recommendations within a 1-3 month period.
The starting point is generally a “business scan” – an evaluation of
the competitive, economic, organizational and industry environment over the
coming 1-3 years, with an emphasis on new sources of competition.
The scan leads to the identification of “business imperatives” – the
“must do” list for the organization. That in turn helps clarify the imperatives
for IT.
The scan is based on Peter Keen’s extensive research base and practical
experience across countries and industries plus a “diagonal slice” of interviews
and discussions with senior executives to identify their priorities and
perceptions and meetings with relevant individuals and groups to clarify the
practical issues of implementation, process, culture and dialog needed to make
most effective use of IT as a business and organizational resource.
The outputs from the engagements generally include a presentation to the top
management team, a business-centered 15-25 page report, and additional workshops
and presentations to communities across the organization, at the discretion of
the client.
Follow-on
engagements often include executive education programs to mobilize the
organization and establish both dialog and shared understanding in the business
and IT units.
Peter maintains close working relationships with many associates, including
individuals, small consulting, technology and education firms, universities, and
the elite large consulting and IT service firms. He often works as an associate
or adviser in their own projects. He draws on this network of relationships when
clients need larger-scale resources than he provides and in many instances will
recommend to clients one of his associate contacts; he has a firm rule of never
accepting a referral fee for making any such connections. |