Summer 1998: Future Visions

Speakers:

• Peter G. W. Keen, Founder and Chairman of Keen Innovations
• Jim Beebe, Business Operations Manager for AT&T
• Guy Miller, Staff Manager for AT&T
• John Parkinson, Partner in the Connected Enterprise Solutions Group of Ernst & Young LLP

Synopsis

Peter G. Keen explores the future economic challenges of IS managers. He discusses how anticipating and managing the economic, organizational, political, and cultural side of the innovation management equation can prevent the failure of major technology initiatives, a major risk to IS managers. Mr. Keen emphasizes that the ability to anticipate and manage these aspects, in addition to managing the technology side, can be the key to professional and business success.

Issues addressed include:

• The senior management policy decisions needed to ensure an enterprise IT platform rather   than a multi-technology muddle.
• The cost dynamics of IT, with a focus on the 80% of cost "iceberg," that dwarfs the visible costs.
• A convincing economic model for evaluating IT investments – convincing for the CEO
• The human capital needed to make IT systems work organizationally as well as technically.

Speaker: Peter G.W. Keen

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, and Stockholm University. He is currently a visiting professor at 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 was published in early 1997.

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. His most recent book, Online Profits: A Manager's Guide to Electronic Commerce was published in October, 1997.

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, Sweden Post, Unilever, World Bank, IATA, 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.

Speaker: Jim Beebe 

Jim has a BS degree in Computer Science from Saint Peters College, Jersey City, NJ. During his 15 years with AT&T he has captured a diverse experience within the technical community having held computer programming, system requirements, production support, system testing, contingency planning, and disaster recovery planning positions. He also held positions providing methods and procedures for data center operations and user’s system requirements for business customer care operations. Jim holds a certification in Business Continuity Planning via the Disaster Recovery Institute in St. Louis, MO. Currently Jim manages the business operations including budgeting, capacity forecasting, scheduling feature implementation, interfacing with business partners, and is the vender liaison.

Speaker: Guy Miller 

During his 30 years with AT&T Guy has held numerous positions within the Technical Labs community as well as Network Operations, Business Customer Care and AT&T Call Center Operations. He currently manages 17 technical staff members responsible for providing customer self servicing solutions for AT&T’s internal call center operations providing customer self servicing opportunities for business customers via the WEB and IVR/CTI.

Demo: Jim & Guy support an Interactive Voice response platform known as Escape (Enterprise Solution to Call Processing Evolution). This platform provides customer self servicing opportunities to AT&T’s business customers via DTMF interaction. In an effort to increase the number of self servicing transactions and improve customer acceptance of self servicing they are in the process of implementing Speech Recognition technology. The Speech recognition Demo utilizes a teleconferencing scheduling scenario to demonstrate the use of speech recognition.

Speaker: John Parkinson  

John is a Partner in the Connected Enterprise Solutions (CES) Group of Ernst & Young LLP (E&Y), part of E&Y LLP’s US National Consulting Services practice and CES’s Chief Technologist. He joined E&Y in the UK in 1985 and moved to the USA in 1991. John has degrees in Mathematics and in Information Sciences from Exeter University, UK. He has been involved with the information technology (IT) business since 1972 and has worked in virtually all roles within IT from programmer to general manager of a software house. He has managed or directed IS Strategy, Technology Architecture, Requirements Analysis and large-scale systems development projects in the UK, USA, Europe and the Middle East. He has written or edited four and has contributed over 40 papers to conferences and journals. He is a frequent speaker at international meetings on emerging technologies, IS architectures, development methodologies, IS process redesign and related topics. He is currently the Chief Technologist for the Connected Enterprise Solutions Group, which is developing and deploying a new generation of technology and process enablers for Interactive Publishing, Electronic Commerce and Knowledge Management. In addition, he is a member of the US firm’s Technology Planning Task Force and a member of the technology advisory groups for Ernst & Young’s major technology enablement projects in Audit Innovation, Tax services innovation; Electronic Work Papers Automation, Knowledge Management and Internet technology commercialization.