| Instant Success Takes Time |
Companies best equipped for the twenty-first century will consider investing in real-time systems as critical to maintaining their competitive edge and retaining their customers. By this, I mean that they will use information and telecommunications technology to respond to continuos changing circumstances. Even more important, customer expectations within the smallest possible lapse of time. They will understand that real-time is about exceptional responsiveness. They will realize that customers' expectations are being reset for hyper-accelerated, if not immediate, company response, no matter what they happen to be buying. The competitive environment will no longer tolerate a slow reaction or delayed decision making.
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While many companies are speeding up their various internal processes, minimizing procedures, and eliminating costly delays. Application of the most potent real-time concept - using an information feedback loop from customers and market infrastructure to design and service, and back out again - has barely begun. Most approaches today are fragmented, not part of a unified business strategy. Real-time is emphatically not about pure acceleration or merely doing faster what organizations have done before. Nor is it specifically about the Internet, although the World Wide Web is unquestionably a real-time technology.
Creating a real-time organization will be similar to the exercise of implementing total quality management (TQM). In the 1980s, many companies striving to improve the quality of their products and services discovered that attention to quality was not just a discrete step in the management process. The importance of quality had to be embedded in the thinking of every person in the organization. Implementing TQM was and still is a difficult and challenging process. So is deploying real-time processes and systems.
Managing the information technology behind the ultra-responsiveness of real-time is not a job that can be delegated to a chief information officer or any other kind of specialist. It requires total management engagement. This is not to say that leaders of successful real-time organizations will have to turn themselves into computer programmers but that they will have to grasp and act on the ramifications of real-time.
How can organizations be prepared to reconceptualize what they do in this way? First, by exposing people at all levels of the company to examples of successful adaptations to real-time thinking and operation: ways of developing channels for interactive relationships with customers and building customer communities; using information technology networks to generate and test new ideas and innovate faster; educating and training customers in new and labor-saving ways of accomplishing their ends by building instructions into technologies located in or accessible from their houses or offices or even cars.
Deborah Doyle McWhinney, Visa International (www.VISA.com)
ATM networks are real-time embryonic systems, and Deborah Doyle McWhinney, executive vice president at Visa International, is a pioneer in their design, installation, and management. She talked with me about what this experience has taught her about the technology-toned consumer.
I have been able to observe - and in some cases, drive - fundamental changes in consumer banking behavior. Managing the Consumer Electronic Banking Division for Bank of America
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