Through the ups and downs of the technology industry’s past decade,
the Kellogg School Digital Frontier Conference has addressed business dynamics impacting leading edge firms.
The 10th annual DFC, held Jan. 30-31 in the Donald P. Jacobs Center, had as its theme “Business in a Connected
World,” emphasizing the role technology plays in enabling businesses and driving innovation in both tech
and traditional industries.
Intuit President and CEO Steve Bennett kicked off the conference with a keynote accenting the importance of
customer-driven innovation and leadership. He referenced his firm’s
core competencies, saying that Intuit delivers customer-directed invention that solves complex problems and transforms
the way people run their businesses and manage their financial lives.
To learn more about client needs and how to create products that meet these needs, Bennett said that cross-functional
teams of Intuit engineers and marketers engaged their accounting customers “in vivo,” taking notes of the actual
way these people worked.
More broadly, Bennett emphasized the need for leadership, citing Intuit’s operating values as a principle source
of guidance for the firm. Among some dozen points, Bennett highlighted values such as “integrity without compromise,” “think
smart, move fast,” and “customers define quality.”
“Managing the culture and architecture of a company is a challenge for leaders,” said Bennett. “Sometimes
you have to break or bend operating values if it’s the right thing to do. You can be led off-track if you
interpret the values too literally.”
Bennett also discussed the importance of “shared vision,” “bullet train thinking” that
creates significant change, and continuous learning, for both individuals and organizations.
“’Learning organizations’ are made up of leaders that learn, teach, learn, and have
the courage
to drive change,” he said.
Following Bennett’s address on DFC’s opening
night, Kellogg School Professors Mark
Jeffery and Mohanbir
Sawhney shared insights about their technology research
at Kellogg.
They noted that in 2002 some $780 billion was invested in the United States on information technology, yet there
remain significant questions about how to maximize the return on this investment.
"Vision creates opportunity, but execution creates success. My research and teaching focuses on how best to
execute technology projects and investments to manage risk and maximize the upside potential," said Jeffery,
clinical assistant professor of technology.
He and Sawhney, McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology, have surveyed 130 top corporate CIOs to understand the
process of how firms invest in information technology. In addition, the professors have developed a portfolio
maturity model to define this process — “a valuable benchmarking tool for firms,” said Jeffery.
Their research has indicated “a significant statistical link between firms that optimize their IT investment process
and the return on assets of the firm.”
This research has been reported widely in the trade press, including the December issue of CFO Magazine; the Kellogg
School researchers are currently writing up their results in academic and general management articles.
Other DFC keynote speakers included James Shanks, executive vice president of CDW, and Dan Sheeran, senior vice president
of marketing for RealNetworks. The conference’s Saturday agenda also included a number of panel discussions
on such topics as corporate security and digital privacy, wireless devices, and entrepreneurship.
