There's a [Hong Kong] company called Lee and Fung - it serves The Gap and The Limited - that could be considered a custom supply chain company. It gets an order and orchestrates a broad variety of external assets but guarantees delivery of the product at a specific time and place at a better cost than The Gap could get elsewhere. The company has approximately 8000 employees, but it leverages about 1 million outside the company in its manufacturing base. It's like having a 1 million person company but without having to carry them on the payroll.

The interfaces between [technologies] have enabled industries to fragment, so the integration challenge becomes more broad. If you sit at the hub of these networks and manage the integration among the different pieces, you can enjoy tremendous leverage.

Are there any reliable red flags raised when companies are going down the wrong integration path?

A lot of companies get rid of their integrators [by outsourcing] because they don't understand their value. Architectural knowledge is foundation number one. I have good friends at Ford running global logistics. They've outsourced so much of their process that they no longer have the expertise to understand how it all comes together. Leverage your resources as much as you want, but keep the integrators inside.

Number two: Don't think of technology integration as an administrative task. The challenge of managing the integration process runs simultaneously with the challenge of figuring out how to integrate. You've got to understand how the technologies come together, which is not the same as putting a person with expertise in Technology A with a person with expertise in Technology B. We're talking about the cult of the architects. They understand the interactions among different system components and can figure out how to design the whole to best manage that interaction.

The third piece is experimentation. We've found people underinvesting in experimentation. Integration is hard. One way it blows up is when you finally pull everything together. Experimentation, however, is easier because many assets are external. Let's say you're thinking about whether to deploy CRM. You don't have to do this humongous internal project. You pick a target business to run a trial, get an On Demand version of CRM from IBM, and try it out for three months. If it goes well, you get a contract or bring it in internally. If it doesn't, you throw it out.

In every study we've done, people who experimented more have always done better.

Does a company ever finish integrating? Can a CIO ever say: "There, I'm done?"

Do you ever hit the end of innovation? Do you know when it's done?

What you want to do is build an engine that can do this systematically - scan the environment for technologies coming in, understand scenarios on the customer side, define the technology or product plan, and determine what projects to do. In companies that do this best, the process is like an engine. The method may have a time-scale of a month or every quarter or every year where you resurface and select which [technology] you want to win the next phase. You pull it together, integrate and deploy, and come up for air again. It's a repeatable process. It's structuring the unstructurable.

Wayne Gretzky said he was successful because he didn't skate to where the puck was but where it was going to be. Where's the puck going to be for CIOs?

There's actually a Franz Klammer [Olympic gold medalist] analogy for that. When they clocked him skiing on any individual part [of the race course], he was not the fastest. The only part where he was fastest was coming out of the turns. He wasn't braking as much as the others. You can think of him as having a better view of the system, so overall, he was faster.

It's not so much understanding where the puck is going to be but having a view of the game that enables you to look outside and have the best understanding of how the game is played. It's always the system and how technology works within the system that makes the difference. Look at the global picture. Look outside and figure out where the business is going. That will tell you where the technology is going.