prof. David Robertson

If you had one hour with the management team of your company to talk about IT, what would you say? Why is the company not getting the value it should from its IT investments? What is their responsibility?

In this talk, Professor Robertson will use material from his book Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution (co-authored with Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill from MIT) to show why enterprise architecture is a top management issue, and what management should do to transform their company’s architecture and IT. He will explain why the common prescription – aligning IT strategy with business strategy – makes things worse! Using data from a survey of over 150 companies and case examples from leading companies such as ING DIRECT, Toyota, and Johnson & Johnson, Robertson will show why IT is often a barrier to strategy execution, and how companies can design and implement a new architecture that improves agility, lowers costs, and increases profitability and growth.

David Robertson is Professor of Innovation & Technology Management at IMD university in Switserland. David Robertson teaches innovation, technology and ICT management. He joined IMD from industry in 2002. Prior to IMD, he held several executive management positions in enterprise software companies, including:

• CEO of an enterprise software company, responsible for all phases of the company’s operations
• VP of product and industry marketing at Baan Company, a Dutch ERP software company (now part of Invensys);
• VP of ecommerce marketing at eCredit.com, a provider of online credit and financing services;
• Director of consulting services at Art Technology Group, a provider of online sales and content management applications;

From 1991 to 1996, David spent 5 years at McKinsey & Company in the US and Sweden, where he worked on projects such as: redesigning the product development process for a European automaker, helping them move from developing one model at a time to developing multiple models from a common platform, restructuring a steel maker to reduce annual costs from $600M to less than $500M, while improving quality and delivery performance. Performing a strategic analysis of the automotive components business to identify opportunities for profitable growth. 

David is currently doing research in three areas:

• Enterprise Architecture: Companies, like buildings, have an architecture. Architecture – which is the standardization and integration of business processes, job roles, information, IT systems and databases – represents the core capability of the company. If the architecture doesn't support the strategy of the company, the company cannot operate efficiently, nor innovate effectively off that core. This project investigates how companies can transform their architecture to meet the needs of the business.
• Improving the Innovation System: Most companies by now have a clear idea of what they should do to bring creative new concepts for products and services to market. Yet they don't do what they know they should. While much has been researched and written about what companies should do, less has been written about how to transform the innovation system. The goal of this project is to understand the best practices in transforming the innovation system of an organization.
• Technology Leadership: Leadership in technical organizations, be they Engineering or IT organizations, is a difficult task, and companies often have difficulty finding or developing such leaders. This research project is focused on understanding the unique challenges of leading technical organizations, and how such leaders can be nurtured and managed.

David obtained his MBA and PhD in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management and his BS in computer engineering from the University of Illinois.