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Past Symposium/ITxpo
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Friday, 4 October 2002 These days, enterprise executives and managers are hearing a lot about the real time enterprise, or RTE. Gartner has identified the RTE as one of its key research areas and will be publishing extensive research on this topic during the next few months. Jamie Popkin, Gartner vice president and research fellow, and Symposium/ITxpo chairperson, gives a brief overview of the Gartner perspective on the RTE and how Gartner can help IT professionals understand this rapidly evolving concept. What's Gartner's definition of the real time enterprise? The RTE lets enterprises compete more effectively by using up-to-date information to remove delays in managing and executing its critical business processes. This means reducing end-to-end cycle time in the areas that are most important to a particular business. This might be in operational, day-to-day areas like the-order-to-cash cycle, or might be in high-impact strategy areas like mergers and acquisitions or new product development. What benefits does the RTE offer? There are basically three areas of benefit with RTE. The first is the reduction of waste. Most business processes could be run more efficiently if they were re-engineered to take full advantage of Internet technologies. Second, RTE enables more competitive customer service. This is the age of the "time-tortured" consumer who will trade speed and convenience for price. Mass retailers and supermarket chains rely on this to preserve margins under conditions of intense price competition. Walmart's number-one position in the Fortune 500 is evidence of this. Customers demand fast responses or they will take their business elsewhere. Finally, RTE facilitates improved management decision-making. The increasing economic pace means managers have shorter and shorter windows of time to make decisions. The earlier information gets to them, the longer they get before the decision deadline arrives and the better the quality of their decision. Can you give a concrete example of a business that has benefited from RTE? Sure. Ford saved $1.2 billion per year by reducing its product development time from seven years to four. Bell Canada increased its productivity by 33 percent by reducing the duration of its IP and broadband provisioning process from between 30 and 60 days to 18. What industries need to worry about RTE? Just about all of them. That is to say, any enterprise faced with the twin challenges of impatient customers and the quickening pace of economic change. There might be one or two very old heavy industries that can avoid RTE, but the vast majority of businesses had better take notice, or they're going to have problems down the road. And not very far down the road at that. Most enterprises need to start thinking about RTE now. What are the leading industries in implementing RTE so far? Traditionally, online industries such as banking and airlines have applied RTE principles, but often only in their operational processes, not in areas like mergers and acquisitions or new product development. The IT sector itself does a good job in some places. For example, large retailers have worked very hard on reducing replenishment times in supply chains in recent years, but again they have sometimes tended to focus too heavily in this one area. Enterprises need to change their thinking in this area from tactical to strategic. What are the main components of RTE that enterprises need to have in place? That varies from industry to industry, of course, but enterprises need to establish a schedule for business change and communicate clearly quantified goals across the company. Gartner believes that enterprises need a new enterprise architecture built for agility, especially in multi-enterprise interactions. How can Gartner help enterprises implement RTE? We can explain the fundamentals of RTE, what it is and why it is so relevant right now. We can elaborate with examples from our case history files, showing various approaches that enterprises have taken towards implementing RTE. In short, we can show what the complete roadmap starts to look like. We can help clients sift through the technology options they have and weigh the tradeoffs they must make as they consider ways to reduce end-to-end business cycle times across their organizations. Michael Calvert Gartner Staff Writer |
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