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Steve Prentice, Gartner vice president and research director |
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Mastermind Keynote:
Enterprises Must Evolve – Or Die
Monday, 10 March 2003
Consumers will go on demanding that products and services should be "better, faster, cheaper." That is the inescapable consequence of living in a free, open, competitive economy, and the world is not going to slow down. For businesses, that means facing up to the imperatives of an accelerating world.
This was the underlying theme of an opening keynote session on Monday at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003 in Florence, Italy. Gartner analysts joined forces to stress that "time is the new competitive edge."
Gartner vice president and director of research, Steve Prentice, introduced the session with a touch of fantasy. He read a passage from Alice Through the Looking Glass in which Alice is sternly told, "Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast."
Gartner vice president, Andy Kyte, warmed to the theme of "better, faster, cheaper," reminding attendees that we all share this preference. The demand, he said, "is not going to go away." The implication for business is that "If you can take time out of critical processes, you will become more competitive." The objective is to become what Gartner calls a real-time enterprise (RTE).
This, however, is not something new that requires huge investments. Vice president and research area director, Betsy Burton, stresses that RTE is evolutionary, not revolutionary. She argues that many of the tools are already in place. Business intelligence systems, for example, can be used for RTE initiatives.
"Your developers working with Web services are already doing RTE work," she says. They are thinking in real-time and we have to channel that thinking to bridge the stovepipes of separate systems.
Crossing the boundaries of separate systems means counting the elapsed times between, say, receiving a customer order, placing appropriate purchase orders, undertaking manufacturing or assembly, and arranging delivery and payments. "End-to-end cycle times are hard to argue with," says research director Mark Raskino.
Raskino says such exercises can highlight how IT has still failed to reach managers and enterprise leadership to help them do their jobs. "Managers cannot be effective when they are still relying on spreadsheets and e-mail attachments to collect and share information for decision-making."
It is not only managers who have been starved of IT support. Andy Kyte says: "There has been virtually no support for senior management from IT for 20 years." In massively important areas like disposal decisions, top management typically calls in teams of accountants, auditors and consultants. Internal IT departments' "abilities to support these decisions," he says, "are absolutely appalling."
Kyte concluded by saying that it would not be easy. Enterprises will have to transform themselves into RTEs. Those that decline to do so will face the challenge of evolution: "Some species die".
Jonathan Green-Armytage
Gartner Staff
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