Steps to Real Time

Would you ever advise a company to hold off on real time? When is it not needed?

You don't buy software to become a real-time enterprise, that's ridiculous. What you do is become a real-time enterprise over time. All companies have some of this in place already. The first thing you do in creating a real-time enterprise is analyze your current building blocks. So where have you invested in CRM, ERP, supply chain management? These systems are already connecting employees and customers and partners. So you want to look at how best to exploit these.

Second, you create a real-time enterprise road map, a clear vision of how the company will be functioning as a real-time enterprise. It should lay out the processes that need to be put into place, how you're going to accomplish them, the real-time enterprise people issues, resistance and how to overcome it, and which additional technologies are needed. The road map usually looks three to five years out, and it's somewhat philosophical, but it's got some real milestones along the way.

The third step is to prioritize the processes and functions you want to automate. Where can you line up some quick wins?

Fourth, secure strong supplier, partner, and customer buy-in, because unless you have the suppliers, you're not going to succeed. You have to communicate the real-time benefits for employees, for customers, for suppliers and for partners—meet with them, explain the value proposition and discuss the benefits of participating in your real-time enterprise.

The fifth step is to gain top management support. You have to build a value proposition based on both the executional efficiency (lower cost per transaction, higher revenue per employee) as well as the structural efficiency (the sustainable competitive advantage). You wrap this value proposition up within a business case and offer it to top management.

Step six, you launch change management programs, training programs, and communication programs early on, because in a real-time enterprise people's work is very visible. There are no private C drives. You tell employees what it will mean for their day-to-day lives. All their work remains very visible.

In step seven, you now turn to these real-time technical architectures and applications. There's an explosion of new technologies. You have to research them and see how they fit into your strategy. And the exciting news is that there are just a lot of very cost effective real-time enterprise technologies today.

Step eight, execute your road map in small accomplishable steps, and this is very important in terms of getting buy-in and money. Tackling too large of a technical project will doom its success from the outset. You've got to take small bites and get lots of quick wins.

Nine, deliver strong analytics and operational excellence, which means at each stage of implementing the road map you have to deliver to upper management good analytics so they know what's going on.

Step 10 is measure, record and communicate the success. Report the benefits on a monthly or quarterly basis to top management, to internal users, to suppliers, to partners and to customers.

All of this is a way in a technology downturn to move toward a real-time enterprise without breaking the piggy bank. As you get into it, you are talking fairly significant money. It can be anywhere from a couple of hundred thousand to many, many millions.

Is real-time inevitable?

More companies are moving toward real-time status, and there are have more real-time enterprise vendors. In 2005, there will be many real-time enterprises. Today's real-time enterprises will begin to pull away from the pack, and the competitors will wonder, "Gee whiz, what happened?"

By 2010, I predict there will be an industry that will be roaring. As in CRM, there will be an increased number of real-time enterprise vendors, consultants and analysts. Real-time enterprises will sustain their leadership. Customers will prefer to work with them. Venture capital will invest heavily, and market caps will begin to soar. My humble opinion is that you cannot avoid becoming a real-time enterprise, because if you try to avoid it, you'll be squashed by your competition as it runs away from the pack.

It just makes sense. Do you like to be told, "Let me put you on hold, I'll get back to you"? None of us likes that. And if we have the information and we have the technology and we can put processes into place, why in the dickens aren't we working in real time? When I visited my 10-year-old niece recently, she said, "Uncle Bart, what was your favorite Web site when you were my age?" These kids aren't questioning the real-time enterprise, they're wondering, "What's your problem?"