Gransee attributes that success in large part to the company's approach to change. So the increasing pace of change in technology, he thinks, plays right to Eddie Bauer's marketing strength. And the name of the game is speed.

"You have to make decisions quickly and th en come up with the ways-technology and everything else-to make those decisions work," says Gransee. "In the old cycle, you could consider everything, but you could also hit analysis paralysis. Now, you can't be afraid to make a decision just because the conditions are going to change and make that decision obsolete."

Emphasis on speed has forged tighter integration between Bauer's inventory databases and marketing efforts, including its Web site. Reducing cross-functional time lag means that marketing and advertising folks know almost immediately when an item is out of stock. Thus informed, they can, for example, stop a promotion, heading off at the pass a situation that might leave customers dissatisfied.

Gransee says he is resigned to the fact that he never has the time to do anything as thoroughly as he would like. But he accepts that as the norm-and he makes sure his organization is comfortable with it, too. The CIO's ability to delegate to staff members is also key. "You have to empower them to make decisions, which reduces decision-cycle time," Gransee says.

Everyone in Gransee's organization knows that perfectionism is no longer permitted; the company doesn't have time. Says Gransee, "You just have to do the best you can."

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"Our staff has to be able to work with incredible ambiguity, be self-confident, simplify, and trust others, because we have an absolute interdependency with other departments," says Mike Radcliff, Owens Corning's CIO. "Most of all, we have to embrace `good enough' reengineering, good enough that we can progress-not necessarily what we'd do in the ideal world."

Owens Corning, a $3.6 billion concern in Toledo, Ohio, reengineered its IS organizatio n to create a project environment that lets the IS group replicate project processes across the company instead of starting each project from scratch. The company also selectively outsourced the maintenance of legacy systems and other commodity talents, reserving staff for the high-speed application development projects that Radcliff calls "10.2 on the Richter scale."

"We have to have a strategy of not only attacking on all fronts, but to also do it in a simultaneous, integrated way," he says. "All fronts" means supporting efforts to find new customers in a burgeoning global economy and selling more products to existing customers.

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But adaptable, flexible systems won't work without the right people running them. New York-based Chase, in leaping from $4 billion in assets to $42 billion in seven years, has changed its hiring criteria. "One of the core competencies we look for now is the ability to deal with ambiguity," O'Leary says. "You look for people who find change stimulating and not threatening."

Just as important in an IS team member: the ability to share and to partner. "Guarding your turf," O'Leary stresses, "is one of the most threatening elements I can think of when dealing with change."

In technology, O'Leary keeps one eye on the future, but also tries to enhance the present. "If you're constantly building the nex t platform, you're not optimizing the platform you have," he says. "Stay on a technology long enough to exploit it before you shift to the next one. Walk up a staircase, instead of a ramp."

Like many other CIOs, O'Leary believes managing vendors is a critical element of managing change. "You have to fundamentally shift the mind-set of what a vendor is, identify strategic suppliers, and look beyond the next purchase," he says. "Chase can't be in the pure R&D business. We have to leverage the vendors' research and expertise."

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"Whatever new product we implement should be pretty intuitive," say s Unger. "Fortunately, we use a lot of products that are far easier to learn than products used to be."

Within the past three years, Chrysler, in Highland Park, Mich., has deployed a huge Netscape-based intranet and rolled out Lotus Notes to thousands of internal users. Information including competitive analysis, company and industry best practices, and, more recently, data mining results are accessible to Chrysler professionals trying to stay on top of their business. Before the company built its intranet, there was no central place for this information.

Unger believes the Chrysler IT group must act more like a systems integrator in managing an increasing number of technology vendors, and, often, small startups. A case in point: Chrysler recently deployed a system called Mopar Diagnostics throughout its dealer network, the result of technology from 10 key suppliers. "In the past, you might have had two or three or maybe even one," says Unger. "But today you get the best solutions from tapping a vari ety of sources. You'll see more and more IS organizations taking on that role."

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"To me, partner is the most abused term in the industry because it's so often a one-way street," says Mark Mastrianni, GE's manager of technology, who reports to the company's CIO, Gary Reiner.

Change management is nothing new at GE. In most departments, regular meetings known as CAP sessions-short for Change Acceleration Process-have become a way of life under chairman Jack Welch and his famous Six Sigma quality program. But in the past two years, Mastrianni and the IT department have seen unprecedented technology and business change. "We're seeing technology life cycles that are shorter than the anticipated life of the contract agreement," says Mastrianni. "The shelf life of information is shorter, too. In some businesses, we need to close our books daily, even hourly."

To deal with that, GE has moved "closer to the bleeding edge these days than we've been historically," Mastrianni says. One example: GE signed a license for 100,000 Netscape browsers in 1995, even before Netscape went public. Another example: Last year, GE Information Services formed the Actra Business Systems joint venture with Netscape to sell electronic-commerce and Web EDI (electronic data interchange) software. "With Netscape, we just jumped in on the front edge and said, `This is going to be big,'" Mastrianni says.

Given GE's huge size-revenue topped $70 billion last year-the company has generous resources with which to respond to market changes. Still, that power's a lot easier to harness when all the horses are moving together. So over the past 18 months, GE has reduced the number of different E-mail systems in the company from 20 down to one: Microsoft Exchange.

Few technologies can help managers deal with market and technology changes better than a standard communications platform. Says Mastrianni, "You have to know where to put the stakes in the ground."

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Service Merchandise, in Brentwood, Tenn., is a $4 billion retailer of toys, sporting goods, housewares, and other goods. To keep those goods moving, Brame's IT group is responding on two fronts.

One is tactical. Service Merchandise will provide detailed signs in the stores that give customers information they can use to compare different products' prices and features. It's also giving the buyer a chance to perform "assisted self-service"-customers check themselves out at the register by scanning the items they've selected.

The other response is strategic. Service Merchandise uses data mining tools from MicroStrategy Inc. to analyze its own Informix Software Inc. database for every trend and customer characteristic. That lets Service Merchandise cater to the 5% to 10% of the chain's customers who ring up most of its sales.

Serious business, of course-s o serious that an effective IT organization needs humor to keep from going crazy. Brame's attack on pace-of-change stress re-quires daily laughs, frequent exercise, and "fully informing our staff and making sure they get the thanks they deserve for doing their jobs in this kind of environment," he says.

It's hard to keep morale up when priorities change before a project is done, but Brame needs his staff members to attack the next project as well as they did the previous one. "The key to success," he says, "is to try to get the staff to laugh about it and make sure they clearly understand the business reasons for the change." Then, it's on to the next project.

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"One of the biggest changes that IT has seen is that if people aren't happy, they pick up their goods and walk," says John Andrews, president of the company's IT unit, CSX Technology in Jacksonville, Fla. "People are much more migratory and, frankly, mercenary. The good organizations have scrapped their hierarchies; the bad ones have 30% turnover."

On the technology side, CSX's strategy for innovation is to bring in innovative technologies, pilot them under the Advanced Solutions unit headed by VP Marshall Gibbs, and make them mainstream. Such was the case with Java, which CSX piloted in early 1996. Java is now the company's core development language. Next up are network computers; CSX is beta testing 1,000 of them. "It's not pure R&D. Marshall [Gibbs] is accountable for delivering business benefits," says Andrews. "The transition elements fo r traditional R&D are too long for today's business world."

CSX demands that vendors share with the transportation company their development strategies for new technologies, while CSX contributes a real-world test bed, or "sandbox." Adds Andrews: "We didn't do Java by ourselves, and we're not doing NCs or Oracle financials or Cisco hubs and routers by ourselves either."

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Solvik's technique for dampening the stress is to remind himself how much smaller the issues are in the new Internet model. "The complexity and risk of client-server was so much higher than intranets," he explains. "You can see that in how much more quickly people were able to get up and running with intranets."

Adding to pace-of-change stress is the universal reach of communications, especially if your company sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, as does Cisco, in San Jose, Calif. "Jobs used to be 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and they stopped when you left the workplace," Solvik says. "But with ISDN and cell phones and voice mail, people are able to work and be productive in a lot of places and times they weren't before. The challenge is, some people consider that a chain around the neck."

Like GE, Cisco isn't afraid to take risks by being in the forefront of technology. When the pace of change is so rapid, such risks-if researched and executed properly-are rewarded more than ever before. "To lead, I have to pay attention," says Solvik. "We wanted the early competiti ve advantage of doing business on the Net. We wouldn't be the biggest E-commerce site in the world unless we knew what was out there and bought into bleeding edge two years ago."

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Now technology at FedEx is moving so quickly, it's turning conventional wisdom on its head. "We encourage our people to seek out new technologies and ask, `Do we have a problem that this can solve?'" says Cynthia Hubard Spangler, VP of corporate headquarters systems. "That used to be the worst thing you could do. But the technology and the business are changing s o fast that now the answer is probably yes." One example: Imaging technology for archiving airbills saves money on rekeying.

A big component is education. Everyone in Spangler's group is required to attend vendor presentations in every quarter. "It doesn't matter which vendor," she says. "I just want them to expose themselves to different ideas."

IT managers at FedEx also have required reading; the current book list includes Managing at the Speed of Change by Daryl R. Conner and Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte. There's also an employee-reward program for learning a new computer language or technology. "These aren't big things," says Spangler, "but if you do the little things often enough, it tells people the direction you want to go."

The culture of change in IT at FedEx has produced some big things, too. The company recently won a best-practices award from the Data Warehousing Institute for its Oracle7 database running on an IBM SP-2. The system reduced database-query turnaround time from a week to a few hours. That's nice, but Spangler is already looking down the road. "Someday," she says, "I'm going to laugh at the idea of a query taking hours."

See the continuation of " Pace Of Change "

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