David Robertson is a Professor at IMD International in Lausanne, Switzerland where he teaches Innovation, Technology Management, and IT to IMD’s executive and MBA programs. At IMD, David is currently directing executive programs for Credit Suisse, EMC2, Skanska, GMAC, and HSBC. He was also co-Director of the Making Business Sense of IT program, a joint program between IMD and MIT. Prior to IMD, David was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a consultant at McKinsey & Company for 5 years, and an executive at four enterprise software companies. In addition to his responsibilities at IMD, David is co-founder of a product design firm that has patented and is bringing its first product to market, and serves as a consultant to companies on issues such as innovation, enterprise architecture, and overall business strategy.

Speaking topics

Breaking the Shackles of IT: Transforming your Company’s Architecture so that it Supports Your Strategy. Robertson is co-author (with Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill from MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research) of the book Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution (forthcoming from Harvard Business School Press). Using data from a survey of over 150 companies and case examples from leading companies such as ING DIRECT, 7-Eleven Japan, Toyota, and Cemex, 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.

Continuous Business Improvement: Applying Kaizen to Transform your Company. The “big bang” approach to systems implementation and organizational change is risky and expensive. Yet some companies have been able to make major changes to how they do business without these large, expensive projects. In this talk, Robertson will illustrate how successful companies build a system of governance and management that allows them to make major changes over time without the risk of large expensive projects.

Building an Innovation System: Accelerating Innovation in Your Company. Many companies are unhappy with their innovation systems, but their attempts to change them have failed. The problem is that the methods used to transform other parts of the company – such as business process reengineering or structural reorganization – don’t work for improving innovation. In an energetic, interactive one- or two-day workshop, Robertson will demonstrate how leading companies have improved their innovation systems and how to transform the system in your company.