Tribute to a prodigious scholar, mentor and global thought leader: Professor Peter Keen

Abstract

When the internet was a figment in most people’s imagination, Peter Keen was paving the way for us to understand the many ways in which our lives would be changed forever. He wrote seminal works and textbooks in the area of Decision Support Systems (DSS), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Commerce including Mcommerce. His textbooks on Decision Support Systems gave us an understanding of how organizational decision making needs good information (Keen, 1978; ScottMorton & Keen, 1978). When speaking to my students he would stress that as all commerce is becoming electronic, it is about the relationships that keep businesses alive. The phrase he coined ‘the organization that lives by the online transaction will die by it’ is true today. As his mentee, I knew him to be a prolific writer, speaker who led us in our understanding of the many ways in which ICTs are changing the world we live in. Going through our notes, his words take on a new significance. He told us that just as the strategic global deployment and impacts of ICT have moved to a new phase, so too should ICT research. He noted that research issues center on the extent to which the empirically-observable trends in individual industries and the successes of individual companies represent an evolution in organizational theory that shapes effective practice (Alavi & Keen, 1989; Calloway & Keen, 1996; Earle & Keen, 2000; Keen & El Sawy, 2010). He taught us that as organizations are social systems, the information systems that support them will have to sustain the relationships that enable value to be created (Hackathorn & Keen, 1981; Keen, 1980a, 1980b, 1981b, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993, 2015). He explained that as long as managers remain nonfluent about IT, the human element will be peripheral rather than central to the choices about and impacts of IT. In their application of telecommunications, managerial and organizational choices can be made to permit simultaneous centralization-with-decentralization of Information Systems (Keen, 1981a, 1985, 1990, 1991, 1993; Keen & Woodman, 1984). He highlighted that since all commerce is electronic, what is apparent is that digital business is driven by the same forces as business in general but that one single factor stands out: value is a function of the choice space. It is in this space that the difference between successful and unsuccessful companies is determined.