A lot of us started out as the gurus of the back room, a low-risk, high-reward profession. We managed by hierarchy and were measured by expense-to-revenue ratios. Then in the early to mid-1990s, the world changed. We started controlling the supply chains from end to end, from quote to cash. The CIO position has really become a line job, and every business decision generates an IT event. Information-management systems support every aspect of the way business is run today--ordering raw materials, scheduling loads for the plant floor, manufacturing, transportation--and they create a competitive edge.

The world has changed, and IT is at the forefront of this new business environment. In this new world, boundaries have disappeared and business processes have become end to end, from the customer all the way up to suppliers of our suppliers. Customer value is gauged by how well a company can share information to transform its traditional relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, and employees.

As we expand the E-business enterprise and fully integrate Web architecture into the way we work, we see great opportunity to drive value creation, innovation, and efficiencies for continued growth and industry leadership.

A major benefit of the Internet is a quantum leap in the level and quality of collaboration among the customer, the business, and its partners. While it's difficult for a single company to provide and do everything, a collaborative value chain can deliver a global, comprehensive answer to customer needs. Compaq, because of high-quality alliances and partnerships, constitutes a full-service collaborative value chain, thanks to Internet technology. This collaboration has several dimensions: collaboration within the enterprise and collaboration between the enterprise and its partners, suppliers, and customers. Today, Compaq collaborates with more than 60,000 companies to drive customer satisfaction and deliver increased customer value through faster delivery, richer solutions, and lower cost.

For example, our Compaq Services Network lets 35,000 partners access a broad portfolio of online Compaq service offerings, training, technical support, sales leads, and sales and marketing support that improve response time and efficiency and help Compaq deliver total solutions to the customer. Through CRM systems, a customer problem identified in a call center is shared with one of our service providers that in turn delivers a solution. To complete the cycle, the shared knowledge about solutions from those 35,000 providers becomes available to help prevent future problems.

The promise of customer-relationship management is to better serve the customer. We've gone beyond traditional CRM and are focused on delivering extreme CRM. We see the Internet, CRM technologies, and Compaq's Zero Latency Enterprise as opening the way for a sea change in customer satisfaction. By providing a single face to the customer and a single view of the customer, we can drive open collaboration across the full value chain and offer a personalized experience. All of this assures maximum customer satisfaction.Collaboration is culture, capability, and process. Compaq has championed the culture of collaboration, mastered the technology, and is continuously working the evolution of its business processes. Customers, employees, and partners--every component of our value chain--share real-time customer-solution information. Across a full-service IT company like Compaq, each team is able to understand the current customer situation and deliver the right value: services, products, solutions, and partnerships.

Bob Napier is senior VP of global business solutions and CIO at Compaq.