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September 27, 1999

InformationWeek500
The Millennium IT Manifesto

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Another change is that the practice of training, learning, and process improvement within organizations must be broadened so it overlaps with interorganizational learning and business improvement. With the use of technologies such as high-speed networking and the proliferation of Web sites, intranets, and extranets, distinct organizational boundaries disappear. Learning and process improvement now take place among networks of customers, suppliers, internal personnel and systems, and markets.

Learning and process improvement also should be measured and managed within a framework of capital and asset management-from intellectual capital to human capital.

What this means is that organizations need to explicitly focus on and track their ability to capture information about their customers to enable profiling and customization. They need to chart their web of relationships with those in their business network, as well as the type of relationships they have.

What was previously considered a customer view of the business has to be expanded to a more complete view of customer-relationship management. From the consumer market to the entire supply chain, E-commerce and E-business touch and affect the way businesses form and retain relationships, and perhaps will change forever how business defines relationships with customers.

New Customer Relationships
This change is occurring rapidly. The way we measure customer relationships in a transactional-based system is on a buy-sell relationship, translated into things such as market share, number of new customers, and customer retention. But in a network economy, the measurement of customer value will become more important than the simple number of transactions they perform.

The definition of the customer is being re-evaluated in the new E-business world and will require every company to establish ways to measure their customer relationships.

How can this seemingly intangible concept be measured? Possible measures of importance could include breadth and depth of the relationship; relationship "bandwidth," or the number of different forms the relationship takes and the roles within the relationship; coverage of the relationship across the enterprise; and total relationship value.

Finally, and perhaps most important, companies, IT organizations, and technology managers must deal with rates of technology and business change that were unheard of and not experienced in any other decade. In fact, the rate of such change itself is accelerating.

IT organizations must do more than just cope with such change; they must leverage it. They need to be able to select and enact newoptions in technology, process, organization, and human resources in a way that provides a level of performance that's consistent with the needs of the enterprise. And they must pick a performance target and hit it reliably.

As such, the watchword for IT today is agility. Agility means the ability to turn on a dime, change rapidly, and change the rate of change itself.

Even more important than knowing its current status, an organization has to know where it is heading and how fast it's moving there. Of course, it's equally critical to know how fast your competitors are moving and where they are heading, too.

Ultimately, the business leaders of tomorrow are those companies and IT organizations that can effectively chart their course through these times of unprecedented change while attempting to harness the energy of those changes. Although this poses something of a paradox, it's the dilemma of progress-and the nature of IT and business as we enter into the next millennium.

Howard A. Rubin is a Meta Group Research Fellow, CEO of Rubin Systems Inc., and chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He can be reached at howard_rubin@compuserve.com.

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