Thousand Points of Light

Finally, that transformation of the global economy beginning to play out before our collective eyes is why Fingar's upcoming book will be called Extreme Competition: the 21st Century Business Reformation.

Although the new book will undoubtedly prove at least as valuable to CIOs and other technologists as The Real-Time Enterprise was, Fingar - frustrated that his earlier work was mostly read and appreciated by the usual suspects - is determined to broaden the audience for his new missive to company executives and the boardroom. As long as discussions about BPM are restricted to technologists and BPM insiders, most companies will treat it as nothing more than a technique for squeezing out costs and making incremental performance improvements, Fingar says. But for some early pioneers where the conversation has reached the boardroom, BPM has become much more. The lessons they have to teach are as profound as are the implications of their success.

These are the companies - like GE, Wal-Mart, Virgin Group, Toyota, JetBlue, Dell Computer, Progressive Insurance, Amazon and Samsung - that have used business process innovation to make deep structural changes that have let them reinvent the very ways they operate their businesses and thus changed the game in their industries.

So the real-time enterprise (RTE), far from being the latest "killer application", is a management strategy that calls for squeezing time and associated costs out of processes, transforming how companies operate and even the very businesses they are in.

Such operational transformation - the "next big thing" in business, if you like - is being driven by the emergence of a wired, flat world. "It's about the fusion of business operations and information technology to the point of unity," Fingar says. "That transformation is well under way, and on a scale that fully justifies calling it 'the great 21st century business reformation', where 20th century business doctrines, dogmas and practices are being stripped away or called into question."

Or as he told students at MIT's Sloan School last year: "Things have changed in a thousand small ways as a result of the Internet - e-mail, online banking, information access, connections among business partners, online procurement . . . the list goes on. As the cumulative effect of the thousand points of light of today's business Internet reach the stage of total and immediate access, it becomes clear that a new kind of company, the company of the future, will emerge. In fact, it already has. It's the real-time enterprise."

Getting Real

In The Real-Time Enterprise, Fingar wrote that a working understanding of the RTE would include these characteristics: process automation bridging distinct enterprise boundaries, media and information systems; real-time provision and exchange of information with customers, employees, partners, and suppliers; processes that ensure this information is current and consistent throughout the network; event-driven processes forming a sense-and-respond approach that minimizes manual input, batch processing, delays and inventory; and high adaptability.

"The real-time enterprise is crystallizing out of a process-rich brew in which swim Web-enabled customer relationship management, supply-chain event management, enterprise relationship management, partner relationship management, content management, customer analytics, business intelligence, optimization, forecasting and simulation," Fingar wrote. "Into the mix we can throw technologies, including application servers, enterprise application integration, Web services, microservers, event routers, enterprise portals, and digital dashboards - and at the heart is a new category of software: business process management (BPM).

"This fertile brew has been struck by the lightning of intense competition, bringing to life the first members of the real-time species. Many of these are existing behemoths with the most adaptive corporate DNA - Dell Computer (supply chain), Wal-Mart, GE (digital dashboards), Cisco (internal monitoring and reporting, one-day closing of finances), FedEx and UPS (tracking and self-service logistics management), Royal Dutch/Shell (using sensors to monitor its oil refineries and properties) and the lesser-known Zara (demand tracking and inventory minimization). The uptake of real time by these exemplary businesses gives further weight to the view of renowned venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who sees real time as 'the business story of the next decade'."

While it is CEOs and board members whom Fingar most wants to alert to the new realities, he warns that as companies push towards operational transformation, the implications for IT professionals are profound. "The reason I wrote the RTE book was to get [knowledge about the reformation] into the hands of CIOs who are aware of this change to be ammunition for them to use to help educate the general business bodies."

Above all, the book is meant to show that companies do not want more IT; they want business results, he says.

"We've got all the transaction processing and applications that we could ever want. What we really need is the leadership from the CIO to create the process-managed enterprise, and that means assisting in helping educate the company. And by the way, the reason it falls to the CIO is that most companies are still function-oriented. You know, you grew up and you got your degree in finance and now you're the CFO, you're an engineer and you're involved in manufacturing. The group or the individual who has the widest view of the company, a complete systems perspective, is the CIO."

If companies are to embrace operational transformation, they will need a far greater contribution from IT than ever before, Fingar says, but that contribution will be of a substantially different nature. Those CIOs capable of rising to the challenge will be deep in the thick of the extreme business makeover, because companies pursuing operational transformation first and foremost need that system-wide view of the company, and who better to offer that than the IT professionals? But what they do will be light-years away from what they might have done in the past.

Fingar is convinced building the process-managed, real-time enterprise will demand innovation and rigorous systems thinking from a new generation of IT professionals, stretching some to their limits as the process paradigm shift takes hold.

"It's not your father's IT shop any more, and business process management skills now outweigh yesterday's technical skills," he says.