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June 17, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM U.S./ET (GMT-4)
Larry Bonfante, CIO of the U.S. Tennis Association, will discuss the skills and approaches that your rising IT leaders must learn to be effective in an executive capacity.
How to Handle Your New CEO: Managing Turnover at the Top
June 18, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)
Turbulent times have increased turnover at the top. Find out what Council CIOs have done to "break in" new CEOs—build relationships, set expectations, educate on the role of IT.
Mid-Market CIO Panel: Tips and Techniques for Improving Vendor Relationships
July 15, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)
We'll highlight relationship priorities and best practices identified in a Council study, and we'll interact with a CIO panel on the approaches they've used to improve strategic vendor partnerships.
Executive Competencies Assessment Tool
Assess Your Business Leadership Skills with the Council's new benchmarking tool. Rate yourself in change leadership, strategy, customer focus and more.
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March 01, 2003 — CIO —
Here we go again. The hype-meisters have discovered the Next Big Thing. It is called the Real-Time Enterprise (RTE).
Here’s exhibit A, from Gartner. Gartner defines the Real-Time Enterprise as an enterprise that "competes by using up-to-date information to progressively remove delays to the management and execution of its critical business processes." In a recent report, Gartner opines that in all likelihood, more than 20 percent of Global 2000 enterprise CIOs will cite the RTE as one of their top-five investment areas by year’s end.
Gartner has plenty of company on the RTE bandwagon. A Google search in January turned up 14,100 hits. Vendors such as Asera, PeopleSoft and Tibco Software are staking their claims as "enablers" and "creators" of the RTE. Barton Goldenberg, a CRM consultant, declares that the RTE is "a fundamental paradigm shift in the way companies conduct business."
Really? Is the RTE the greatest thing since sliced bread, or have the vendors and IT consultants, desperate to find something new to sell, created yet another three-letter acronym that claims to take CIOs to the promised land? While the ideas behind the RTE are sound?after all, what company doesn’t want to eliminate delays in management and execution of its business processes?the hype is getting way ahead of its value.
What exactly is the vision of the Real-Time Enterprise? The value proposition of the RTE is rooted in the observation that time delays in business processes are the bane of productivity and competitiveness. By harnessing Internet-based technologies to radically reduce the elapsed time in business processes, the RTE can "sense" and "respond" almost instantaneously to any event that affects its business. Commonly cited examples of RTE-like phenomena are Cisco’s ability to close its books daily, Wal-Mart’s continuous ordering and replenishment, and Dell’s rapid order fulfillment process.
It’s a compelling vision, but here are a few myths and misconceptions to keep in mind:
In an influential 1988 article, George Stalk wrote about Time-Based Competition, an operational strategy that focuses on compressing total throughput time in an organization by changing the processes and structures used to design, manufacture and deliver products. In the 1980s, Japanese companies were using Just-in-Time management, a philosophy that seeks to eliminate all waste in operations to achieve speedy production while using minimal inventories. And the concept of radical reduction in elapsed time of business processes sounds like Business Process Reengineering (BPR), which required "fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, service and speed."