One of the hallmarks of the somewhat depressing IT landscape of the last three years has been its overriding emphasis on cost-cutting, mending and making do, and other terms for living off the IT body fat accumulated in the boom Y2K/dot-com period.
But as the general economy recovers and business confidence returns, organisations will increasingly turn to technologies -- of a variety of stripes -- which can enable them to both further streamline their operations and improve efficiency, but also to massively speed up their rate of operations.
The idea is that in a world where customers can find out all about you on the Web, plus expect to buy off you or commercially interoperate with you online, your company needs to be as nimble as possible.
Isn't that the old e-commerce message? Not quite. "In a world where nightclubbers talk about 24x7, and more and more 'Indianisation' is going on of processes, we're really talking about the Now Economy, not the New Economy," says Mark Raskino, research director for IT management, Gartner Europe.
Get aggressive
Indeed, Raskino's organisation has been talking about the real-time enterprise (RTE) since 2001, defining an RTE firm as one that competes by "aggressively reducing [the time of] its critical business processes". The lynchpin of RTE is when a company takes aggressive steps to extract as much time from core processes as possible -- between 30 percent and 90 percent is recommended, says Gartner -- and uses this to deliver customised products, fast.
Dell and Cisco, sure: probably Amazon, possibly eBay. But also think of non-digital giants like General Motors, which says it has slashed car-design cycles from 48 months to 22, or innovative low-cost airlines like JetBlue, based out of New York. What these RTE companies have in common is the ability to use Internet and communication technologies to re-mould their business processes: think of it as "if we had to start again, how would we do this?"
