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August 23, 1999

Business Transformation:
How To Get From There To Here

Bob Evans I 've always found the old bromide, "You can't get there from here," to be both puzzling and amusing. It seems to imply some cosmic and fatalistic treadmill on which we find ourselves trapped, unable to make the journey from here to there for reasons that have less to do with reality than with narrow thinking. Now, to be sure, some of San Francisco's hillier neighborhoods pose some very nontrivial challenges when trying to get there from here, but it's nonetheless possible.

These days, the can't-get-there-from-here pilgrimage everybody seems hell-bent on making is from bricks and mortar to clicks and mortar. Commitments are made, vows of sacred fealty are sworn, resources are mustered, but it's nevertheless hard as heck to get started because nobody's exactly sure which way to go. The would-be travelers find that, like the lost trio in The Blair Witch Project, their map is nowhere to be be found and they're left to wander, directionless--and with the end of each successive day, bigger and bigger things are going bump in the night all around them. In a business world where the dimension of time has been dramatically foreshortened, such indecisiveness can be fatal.

Here at InformationWeek, we're spending a lot of our time and energy trying to understand the process of getting from here--the realm of traditional business--to there--the realm of E-business. The journey is one we think is best described as transformation: of thinking, of culture, of customer relationships, of products and services, of reward systems, of partners, suppliers, competitors, and opportunities. It's not about abandoning the past, but, rather, about a combination of the best ideas and assets from your traditional business along with the dynamic new opportunities and customer-centric possibilities of E-business. I would submit that to companies unable or unwilling to make this transformation, the future looks very ugly indeed.

So I want to propose a broad set of directions for what is required to undergo this sweeping type of business transformation. The first step is the recognition that the journey is never really completed--it's a process that companies will very likely have to undergo constantly as they adapt to new customer interests and demands; new market dynamics, including pricing and distribution models; new ways of aligning with other elements in the extended value network; and new ways of establishing a culture that is both strong and highly adaptive. At the core of this effort--perhaps the defining objective--is customer-centric innovation: the ability to push as many assets as possible out toward customers. The five drivers toward that objective, we believe, are speed, culture, knowledge, IT, and, of course, great people. Here's how we think they work together.

  • Speed: The recognition that customers, whether businesses or consumers, are demanding more choice in more areas and are unwilling to sit and wait until market participants decide to adapt to their needs and desires. The relentless pace of change that has swamped the global business world is now a fixed reality; it's here to stay, and companies must factor it into all their thinking. This isn't just limited to faster rollouts of new products and services--rather, it's even more significant for faster decisions on hiring and signing deals and harvesting market intelligence and analyzing the future.
  • Culture: Are all your employees committed to living with rapid and often profound change? Are they able to share and value the vision of a customer-centric enterprise? Are risks properly evaluated and pursued, or assiduously avoided?
  • Knowledge: Does your company view information as the goal, or as raw material that helps create the more-valuable asset of knowledge? Do your culture and reward systems promote the sharing and enhancement of knowledge? Can all employees viscerally understand the links between customer knowledge and customer loyalty?
  • IT: Do you have the technological muscle to compete in markets where business opportunities are increasingly interlinked with IT expertise and deployment? Try to imagine the world two years from now; as significant as these assets are now, how much more indispensable will IT be to global E-business in 2001?
  • Great people: Clearly, the defining element. (Is the appropriate Latin phrase sine qua non or ex hoc propter hoc?) Great people today have almost unlimited choices--how do companies make themselves stand out enough to attract these folks? Surely, it's not just about money--but what are the other considerations?

    I don't doubt that other drivers could be added to this list, and I'd like very much to hear your suggestions. I'd also like to ask for help on those Latin phrases, because I think one of them means "that without which" and the other means "you can't get there from here," and I don't want to get them mixed up.

    Bob Evans
    Editor-in-Chief
    bevans@cmp.com


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