2007-03-21

Mike Hugos, Partner
Effective Systems, Inc.

Moving Towards the Agile, Real-Time Enterprise

Building the Real-Time Enterprise
The greatest innovation since the assembly line is staring us in the face.  Yet we miss it because it is based more on a new business process than on any new technology.  By analogy, an innovative process called the “assembly line” was introduced at the beginning of the 20^th century.  Industrial technology had been in use for more than sixty years prior to this.  Yet it was the assembly line that created the real wealth of the industrial age.  Information technology has been in use for a similar period; and at the beginning of the 21^st century, we are seeing the introduction of another process innovation called the “real-time enterprise”.  It will be the great wealth generator of this century.

The relentless pursuit of efficiency no longer yields the profits it once did because it requires a level of business predictability that no longer exists. In our high change, global economy responsiveness trumps efficiency.  The real-time enterprise is an organization that uses responsiveness to make profits from a hundred small adjustments every day, every week, and from some occasional big wins.  Those companies that cannot make money from a hundred small adjustments and some occasional big wins will soon hardly be profitable at all.

Learn the three essential business processes employed by the real-time enterprise and see how they work together to deliver the responsiveness that generates profits in a high change economy.  Appreciate how technology can be used to enable the real-time enterprise to develop.  Case study examples from the presenter’s own experience are provided to illustrate how companies are now becoming real-time enterprises and the benefits they are experiencing from doing so.

Speaker Biography
Michael Hugos has 24 years of corporate management and consulting experience in business and information technology.  He is a regular columnist in Computerworld and CIO magazine and is author of Building the Real-Time Enterprise: An Executive Briefing and co-author of CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology; both published by John Wiley & Sons.

Hugos recently spent six years as Chief Information Officer at Network Services Company, an $8 billion distribution cooperative. He guided development and rollout of a suite of e-business and supply chain systems that changed their business model from an old-line distributor to a value-added provider of products and supply chain services. In 2003 and 2005 he was awarded the CIO 100 Award for this work and in 2006 he was awarded the Premier 100 Award for career achievement. Prior to this he was a practice director in e-business and supply chain management for Covansys, a global IT services provider. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

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