Linking business strategy with information technology.

So much money spent; so little to show for it. That's one take on IT's impact. Yet there are signs that we are on the verge of a giant transformation.

Companies have spent billions on information technology. Worldwide expenditures in 1991 totaled $905 billion, and this amount is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 1997, according to INPUT Worldwide Information Services Forecast. The U.S. Commerce Department reckons IT represents more than half the annual capital spending by U.S. firms. But CEOs remain frustrated, because expected productivity improvements often prove elusive. In addition, it has dawned on many that IT by itself, while a prerequisite for corporate success, is not the answer.

"The value of IT depends upon how it is used strategically to improve the organization, not on how much it costs, "says Jack Rockart, director of MIT's Center for Information Systems Research at the Sloan School of Management. In the course of his research and interviews with CEOs and CIOs for a Sloan video series, Rockart learned that "corporations that have invested heavily in IT without the buy-in of line management or the re-engineering of business processes will be unable to sustain leadership and eventually may lose market share."

Though support among both middle and senior managers is necessary to convert IT muscle into competitive advantage, it may be difficult to secure. One reason, says George Shaheen, managing partner of Chicago-based Andersen Consulting, is "we do not treat information with the same reverence that we treat human beings or money." John McCoy, Banc One's technology-savvy chairman and chief executive believes many CEOs display an alarming lack of understanding about the technology side of the business. In many companies, IT budgets, once increasing steadily each year, are now flat or nearly so. DuPont, for example, trimmed IT spending from a record $1.2 billion in 1991 to $890 million in 1993. One reason for the rollback: Calculating the payback on IT investment is extremely problematic. A 1992 McKinsey Global Institute study of the heavily computerized airline, telecommunications, food service, retailing, and retail banking industries noted that IT was a significant factor in only two of the five--retail banking and telecommunications. Last year, a joint survey by Andersen Consulting and ComputerWorld found that about half of the 203 senior corporate officers questioned thought they were getting their money's worth fro IT.

If many feel short-changed, the reason may he that CEOs have failed to manipulate IT to maximum advantage. George Hellmeier, CEO of Bellcore, the research arm of the regional Bell operating companies, thinks his technical expertise atypical among his peers in the corner office, and he argues that CEO must understand the technology driving the business, as well as the technology that will change the business. Further, they must assume the role of the designer rather than just the operator of the business.

Failure to do so may consign their companies to a fate similar to that of Bronz Age empires after the dawn of iron-smelting technology.

In the following Chief Executive roundtable, held in partnership with Andersen Consulting, CEOs and experts explore ways to align strategy and infrastructure. They agree the CEO can no longer afford to be a bystander, merely passing judgment on proposals put forward by the CFO or CIO. And they underscore that too often technology competence is thought to be an end in itself. Says Becton Dickinson & Co. Group President Al Battaglia, "Don't benchmark your IT; benchmark your core competence." In other words, mechanizing tasks may only automate a messy process. And productivity gains without fundamental process re-engineering may prove fruitless.

HOP TO IT

Peter Fuchs (Andersen Consulting): Over the next five to 10 years, our information technology capability--computing and communicating through multimedia--will increase by an unprecedented degree. IT already has revolutionized a number of industries, including retail banking and telecommunications.

Companies today produce complex products and significantly reduce time to marke by applying IT and changing business processes. In the last five to 10 years, I has facilitated the delayering of management and has replaced the relay system with intelligent computers.

Business invests tremendous amounts of money in IT, and we've found that a high correlation exists between the amount of new investment--not total speeding--in IT and return. Despite this fact, and despite all the advances in IT, a study w recently conducted revealed that people still believe they aren't getting optimal value from IT. Why?

First, some fail to perceive IT as a support for their business, then as a conductor of the business, and finally as a changer of the business. Even under today's re-engineering efforts, CEOs are not rethinking how to do business usin IT; rather, they're applying it after the fact.

This misperception is not entirely the CEO's fault. Industry expects chief executives to become highly literate in information technology, and that is not realistic.

Josh S. Weston (Automatic Data Processing): Many chief executives think their chief information officer speaks a strange, unintelligible language, so they leave him alone with his black box. Do so at your peril. Insist that your CIO speak English, because if he can't tell it to you in English, the odds are reasonably high that there's a flaw somewhere. Perhaps that's why there's such high CIO job mortality rate--something in the neighborhood of 30 percent a year

George T. Shaheen (Andersen Consulting): Business created the CIO position when it realized that the IT aspect of the enterprise is an important asset that mus be managed productively. The difficulty arose when technology specialists cropped up to manage the data base, software, client-server technology, networks, etc. Now the CIO must act as the interface between the highly focused technologists and the CEO.

COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Alan G. Merten (Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management): Peter, what should CEOs know about information technology?

Fuchs: I suggest CEOs should: Create a consistent, long-term vision for IT, focusing on how their companies serve their customers and how they monitor outcomes in the market. Unite IT with people, process, and strategy in a predetermined and well-thought-out way. Establish big rules, such as insisting that everyone use the same database structure. Encourage organizations to use I to change the way they do business--aim for one-hour mortgage approval, online product customization, and individually tailored messages to marketing segments In short, CEOs must understand the need for information technology.

Phillip B. Lassiter (AMBAC): And on the other side--the IT side--CIOs should understand the fundamentals of running the business. I had to make a change recently, because our technologist--a competent person--couldn't bridge the gap between what we do to earn a living and to supply service and how we integrate that knowledge from a technology standpoint.

William Y. O'Connor (Ascom Timeplex): As divisions and subsidiaries become increasingly autonomous, the information applications become localized. The CIO remains at headquarters trying to coordinate all of the traffic struggling to funnel through the network.

We need a CIO who can function as an arbitrator and handle technology across th breadth of operations. We call this person a corporate network officer.

Weston: The name keeps changing, and the nuances of each one are confusing. Too often, people use the moniker of CIO when they mean CTO, chief technology officer. A technology person seldom understands the structure, the use, and the ergonomics of real information. Information is a high-order subject; technology is a fulfillment tool.

Peter M. Sontag (USTravel): We call our technology group Customer Information Systems. Different nomenclature generates different attitudes.

The vice president of CIS has extensive sales training. He and his staff completed a sales training program in which they learned to translate all the megabytes and bits into English. They participate in customer-focus groups, so they understand what matters. And they're responsible for competitive monitoring, which means they go to trade fairs to find out what the competition is doing. Once a month, I expect a memo on one of our products with an explanation of how it's better or worse than the competition's.

Randall K. Fields (Park City Group): Having IT change its name again scares me to death. We've already gone from IS (information systems) to IT. Changing the name of the function won't change how its practitioners are trained as professionals.

The root of the difficulty is that the CEO is the only person in the business who strategically has to integrate all of the pieces, from operations to marketing. However, one other poor guy in the firm also has to touch everybody, the CIO. But he works with faulty tools. He's trained to look at the world in pieces. "If I just build a solution to this problem, everyone will get off my back," he thinks. "Who's my next problem? Here's your little present."

So he doesn't even start from the perspective of integration. Think of him as a carpenter trying to become a general contractor. If you find someone who has a global perspective on the enterprise and can integrate the chief executive's strategy as it relates to each functional department or group, while remaining current in technology, he will have the CEO's job. I don't think it's possible to do all of those things. That's why the CIO position is called "The Widow Maker" and why it has such incredible turnover.

Robert W. Lear (CE/Columbia Graduate School of Business): In most companies, someone has to train those executives 45 and older to catch up with the technology of the younger group. And someone has to train the younger group to catch up with the programming and the requirements of their elders. What kind o training program bridges the gap between the age groups and the technology?

Robert C. Hall (Thomson Information/Publishing Group): We've begun "Best Practices" conferences. Each month, we bring in experts to discuss issues such as the latest thing in CD-ROM, in which a compact disk acts as a read-only-memory device, and the latest marketing systems.

SETTING STANDARDS

Landon H. Rowland (Kansas City Southern Industries): I'd like to talk about bench-marking. It strikes me that to ask the CIO to benchmark his own organization, its performance, and its contribution is not a bad place to start

We do this to an extent. We're helped by the fact that in our information systems business, we sell benchmarking on an outsourcing basis. Our subsidiary, DST Systems, in essence says, "We can show you how to improve your productivity in mutual fund management and in insurance processing by delivering to you a ready-made productivity enhancement." It's a part of our core competence that w master and sell this ability. We're driving our data-processing capabilities toward customer awareness.

Fuchs: A lot of benchmarking is valuable; some of it is nonsense. Benchmarking can be useful if it focuses on business outcomes and the things important to th business: customer satisfaction and product delivery.

Alfred J. Battaglia (Becton Dickinson): Don't benchmark IT; benchmark your core competence, benchmark competitors. A manufacturer should ask: "What enables our competitor to deliver more completely or more quickly than us? Do we understand that difference?"

We can't expect the IT people to answer these questions. If the people in charg of so-called IT projects are IT executives, you're in trouble. There's no such thing as an IT project. There are finance projects, R&D projects, and manufacturing projects that use IT. And in general, the more radical they are, the more change they bring, and the more they need to be led by those operating people who understand them.

Fuchs: I suggest asking the operating people to benchmark how well they deliver on their outcomes and how they use in formation technology to achieve those outcomes.

Richard N. Daniel (Handy & Harman): I'm glad we finally got around to the operating people. Way back when, we had efficiency experts; today, we have chie in formation officers. That's one more staff man. And to every operating person one more staff man represents another allocation of cost and a pain in the neck

These days, the information guy has to be a salesman. He has to tell the operating people how he can help them be more effective. Otherwise, he's just another technological mumbo-jumbo guy. Unfortunately, however, most of the people you interview for the CIO job have about as much potential to be a salesman to the people operating your steel mills and fabricating plants as I have of being an astronaut.

Weston: No matter what, you have to keep the lines of communication and participation open. If you're doing anything that taps information technology, assign an operating person or a client-service per son to that project from start to finish, so two years later, someone doesn't say, "Ergonomically, this thing stinks." |Laughter.~

Sontag: But the operating people aren't al ways right. Look at American Airlines. In 1955, it had a fleet of 12 aircraft. Employees handwrote flight reservations on slips of paper, which were placed in a bucket that moved on a conveyor belt around the small reservation center, to pass by the various operators. American Airlines realized it could never expand with such a technologically antiquated reservation system. Therefore, the CEO decided to spend a great deal of money--roughly enough to buy two airplanes--on an automated reservation system. This must have been a tough decision, since the operating people were clamoring for more capacity, but the CEO insisted that without the ability to book customers on the planes, the airline couldn't survive.

Charles W. Denny (Groupe Schneider North America): Somehow we have to ensure that the entire IT process leads to customer satisfaction. We're in a rust belt business, supplying complex switching gears to industrial projects. Several years ago, we decided we needed to consolidate our disparate systems. After 18 months of collaboration with our customers and our distributors, we came up wit a system we call "Quote to Cash." That means it encompasses the entire process from engineering to producing quotations to collecting the cash. It leads to something we can measure, customer satisfaction.

INSURING CUSTOMER CONTENTMENT 

Ronald E. Compton (Aetna Life & Casualty): Technology cannot stand alone; it must be evaluated in terms of customer satisfaction.

I would like to share a couple of my experiences at Aetna with you. We've had great successes, and we've had some pretty good failures.

We pay a lot of claims. In 1992, we paid 90 million health-care claims for a total of over $15 billion. We've paid millions of claims in the casualty/property area and thousands of claims in the life insurance area. Our customers are a little peculiar because of the circumstances: They're either sick or hurt or their house was blown away, or they're dead.

With the exception of the latter group, therefore, they are not the most open-minded, accepting people. So we start with the idea that they are suspicious; they are in deep, deep trouble; and they need somebody who knows what the hell to do for them. The aftermath of Hurricane Andrew is a good example. The victims had no electricity, no airconditioning, no telephone. And they needed to know about insurance.

So what did we do? Rocket-science technology didn't solve the problem. Simple telephone switching saved the day. We temporarily transferred a couple hundred staffers to our Tampa claims service center. Personnel from other areas around the country dealt with the rest of the claims and requests. When Tampa was busy the phone rang in Indiana, and if Indiana was busy, the phone rang in Massachusetts. Eveny call was answered on the second or third ring.

In addition, we put all the homeowners policies online around the country, so i you were in Indiana, you could look at a policy written in South Florida.

You would have thought we would have had this technology in place by 1952. Not so. The major installations were done in the fall of 1991. And the system still isn't countrywide yet. Practically an infinite level of technology is available of which we are applying only a small part. However, we don't need any more technology: We need better and faster applications.

Apart from hurricane insurance, we have four "asset accumulation focuses." Amon them are mutual funds and life insurance. Regarding life insurance, we wanted policy recipients to put their insurance money into mutual funds with us, but our old claims system was such a frustrating mass of red tape that people just wanted to take their money and ran. For example, if someone died, the survivor had to look us up in the Yellow Pages and decide which of five Aetna claims divisions the deceased died in. Then he or she could call and get paid. Eventually, we merged these claims departments. We built a new customer service platform, and three things happened: We cut staffing by one-third, improved service, and dramatically increased our recapture of payments into our mutual funds.

Based on these experiences and others, I've learned a few lessons about the CEO's role in IT.

* Lesson No. 1: Be IT literate, drive IT, use IT, and make IT work. When I returned to Aetna about six years ago from my stint with its reinsurance subsidiary, American Re, I was amazed to discover that the top-level Aetna executives did not use E-mail. So I simply started communicating by E-mail, and it was too damned bad if you didn't get yours, because you didn't know how to use the system.

Laptops came next. All of us travel a lot. Suddenly, people started complaining that certain information was distributed when they weren't in town. Tough luck. Needless to say, all of our top-level people now travel with laptops.

* Lesson No. 2: Find out what this technology or tool can and can't do. Everyone reads ads for 240 megabyte hardrive lap tops. I have one. But 240MB is more memory than I could ever use. Similarly, we have access to more technology than we can use. Therefore, we have to be careful not to use more than we need. If you own 40 hammers, can you be building 40 houses? I don't know how many houses you ought to be building, but the fact that you own 40 hammers is irrelevant.

* Lesson No. 3: The business people must have a fairly clear concept of what the output of their ideas looks like. We learned this hard way. The typical conversation goes like this: "I need something," the businessman says.

"What do you want?" the technology person responds.

"What do you have?" the businessman counters.

The technology person wants to help the businessman, so he comes up with a sophisticated system no one understands. He probably could help the businessman more by saying, "I'm not going to lift a pencil until you clearly tell me what you need."

* Lesson No. 4: Technical people have to understand the business needs and ho their tools match them. Otherwise they're going to try to solve a hammer proble with a screwdriver.

* Lesson No. 5: Don't mechanize the existing processes; assume what's there i wrong and doesn't work well. Whenever you're going to institute a new business process, start from scratch.

Battaglia: It's important to remember that these are things the CEO must do, no the CIO. The CIO is not capable of implementing the types of changes we're talking about. I have seen situations where the CEO has allowed technology strategy to lead business strategy when, in fact, it's supposed to be the opposite.

Re-engineering means big changes. And big changes have to be communicated and driven by the CEO. It seems that responsibility has been lost over the years.

Compton: Re-engineering also sometimes means temporary centralization. Right now, Aetna has four major IT operations. The head of each of them reports to five group executives--in effect, his board of directors. That board prints an annual report, has an annual meeting, and holds board of directors meetings. Since this system was instituted, these group executives have not come to me an complained about the IT people.

Eventually, however, all the organizations need to devolve back to the business We only lumped everything together temporarily in order to make sense of things

BEYOND EYE SHADES AND SLEEVE GUARDS

Phillip D. Ashkettle (Reichhold Chemicals): I applaud your desire to return to decentralization. But in doing so, how do you maintain company standards? If yo go back to decentralization, won't the amoebas begin spreading out again and creating their own standards?

Compton: A consortium of the business and IT people in the businesses will set the standards. Once that is done, the standards are absolute until the consortium changes them. I don't think we're going to have any problem doing it

Sontag: How are the priorities set in your executive group?

Compton: The board of directors argues it out, then sets the priorities. If the members can't come to a conclusion, they bring it to me. They never have.

John T. Stihl (Concurrent Computer): In your operating groups, what part does the senior IT officer play in promoting good customer-to-business relationships

Compton: We follow a process called "best of the breed." This means in each of our businesses, a formal team has to identify the three best players in the business and tell us why we're not in that group, if that is the case; when we're going to get there; and how. Obviously, these are not necessarily top IT people, but they are involved in the analysis of our competition. They can find out how our competitors are turning around claims two days faster or producing policies 10 cents cheaper.

Merten: This is the longest conversation on information technology I've ever been involved in that hasn't pointed a finger at vendors and consulting firms. |Laughter.~ What kind of tools have the vendors failed to provide?

Compton: I'm a CEO. If something is wrong, it's my fault. So if I picked the wrong vendor, didn't demand enough, or overpaid, it's my responsibility, not th vendor's or the consultant's.

Arnold B. Pollard (CE): You acknowledged that not all of your efforts to reform and restructure your organization succeeded. What moves tell short of the mark?

Compton: Tapping project managers with insufficient expertise. We need people who can get things done without breaking too much china, without leaving broken bodies everywhere.

Shaheen: The biggest hurdles for our clients are discomfort with technology and the process of change, and the proper execution of change. Execution often come down to talent and methodology.

Compton: We are beyond the days of green eye shades and sleeve guards in my industry. There aren't too many insurance CEOs--in fact, I don't know any--who don't realize you can't generate 90 million health-care claims or deal with a Hurricane Andrew without information technology.

Ashkettle: I've been with three chemical companies over the last 20 years, and I've found that we often stay away from leading-edge information technology, because we have to make sure we don't crash in the middle of running this chemical products business.

In my business, we need the ability to make rapid changes on an older technolog base.

SYSTEMATIC IMPROVEMENT

Fields: The more a CEO wants flexibility, the more he leans on IS professionals to change the company's systems. Each time you change a system, you increase th difficulty and time needed to make the next change. Today's systems are tomorrow's legacy.

And in this decade of long-term restructuring and extraordinary margin pressure CEOs need to understand the strategic objectives of their IT tools in order to gain the competitive advantage they crave. They also need competent first- and second-line managers and IT executives. Based on previous experience, the scarcest resource in any business over the course of the next decade will be management talent, decision-making capability, expertise.

What can we do about this? Andersen Consulting and others are looking at expert systems, or rule-based systems, which are computerized systems that mimic the reasoning processes of the human brain. They prioritize things and change how the information comes at you. They present action plans instead of 62,000 numbers on a screen. They also provide a certain amount of flexibility. CEOs want flexibility in their businesses as a defense against uncertainty in market conditions.

Sontag: We have found that expert systems help us identify and respond to customer behavior patterns. For example, at the touch of a button, our software pack age allows us to access information revealing that the last 12 trips you took, Randy, were city pairs, meaning that you traveled between Salt Lake City and New York each time. And that the last time you did so, you took the 8:30 a.m. flight. Expert systems keep track of the most frequent city-pair trips people take, such as going from Newark to Houston. This creates cross-selling opportunities and helps us to reduce costs for customers.

Our expert systems also have helped us to re-engineer our operations, thereby reducing our costs by between 17 percent for leisure travel outlets and 40 percent for reservation centers.

Compton: We used to have complex life insurance underwriting applications in ou sponsored life business with an incredible number of questions. Finally, someon brought all the life underwriters together and said, "If you could only ask fiv questions, what would they be?" We designed an expert system based on these fiv questions. Today, someone from Aetna goes to a client with a lap top, which contains the application. Our representative sits with the applicant and fills out the form on the computer. A wrong answer, defined as a no-go answer, to any of the basic five questions creates a few more. When the application is done, w print out a policy to be signed.

Battaglia: Our expert system seeks to determine the use of our products in hospitals. By taking a demographic profile of hospitals, we can determine how many syringes or blood collection tools will be used. Then we compare the actua sales to potential sales and make our marketing decisions.

However, this only works if the sales and marketing people are involved in the process. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack to locate an IT executive who understands the hospital marketplace and how many syringes would be used in a 400-bed hospital. We've also brought in medical people to help us, because the hardest part about this is not the software; it's knowing what questions to ask to get the information from the so-called experts, so you can make decisions.

Fields: Any technology--expert systems in particular--is too important to be left to the technologists. Ideally, it must be driven and applied by the CEO. So, instead of selling word processing packages, for example, we sell tools tha look like word processing packages, but that let non-technical users customize them to their own preferences.

Compton: But consider the downside of these systems. We are less than a decade away from providing the most intimate, dangerous service there is to the American public: Electronic performance support system--or protocol--will determine whether you have angioplasty or a bypass. Just think of someone saying, "Phil, I'm sorry, but this computer screen says you're going to have angioplasty, not a bypass."

MAKING MONEY

William E. Mayer (CE/University of Maryland's School of Business): It seems companies everywhere are using expert systems. But what about the financial aspects--how do you measure return on investment?

Shaheen: With expert or knowledge-based systems, the return on the investment can not simply be a measurement of costs and benefits. The power of technology extends beyond this. Benefits can only be achieved when companies realize the technology enables a better way of doing function. Therefore, the use of the technology must be effectively aligned with both the people and processes involved. If these elements are aligned, the financial benefits of expert systems can far out weigh the costs.

Sontag: Bill raises an important question--one that speaks to a gap in our conversation here today. So far, the only IT application mentioned that makes money is the one enabling Becton Dickinson to gauge demand and sell more syringes. Ron, do you use any kind of system that indicates which populations you should be selling more insurance to? And do you then direct your sales forc to target them?

Compton: Yes. For example, in South Florida, we targeted Hispanics. We asked ourselves, "What do these people need? What kind of businesses do they run? Are we capable of providing insurance to them? Do we want to?"

The answer to the last question is, "Yes." So the next logical hurdle becomes how to do it. Fortunately, there's plenty of data available to make a decision.

I don't think IT can be evaluated strictly in terms of costs. It also must be evaluated in terms of costs it saves. Costs justify the end product. Aetna has to produce policies. If it costs us $15 to put out a policy today, the question is not how much does it cost, it's how do you do it for $10? And you know, before you get to $10, we'll be asking you about $7. The answer is, you have to justify the cost of the final part, not the pieces of the process.

ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMATION

J.P. Donlon (CE): We've talked about the division between the CEO and the operations people. What needs to be changed at each level to get a unified approach using IT?

Ashkettle: The CEO must have an integrated vision, based in part on IT. He then has to convince middle management buy into the vision. Middle management can either kill change or facilitate it. So far, case history shows a lot of killers.

Battaglia: At the executive level, the discussion is not about E-mail. It's about what our competitors are doing, our operational imperatives, and how IT can help. In some businesses, particularly commodity-based businesses such as mining and cement, IT can't help. In others, its absence would be incomprehensible. Can you picture a bank or a travel company or an insurance firm operating without IT?

Meanwhile, let's stop blaming the IT executive for all our problems. Problems also are generated by cultural change, communication, and change management--areas he has little to do with.

Denny: The IT manager just isn't in the loop. Some of us in the manufacturing sector probably don't share with that person our vision of the business.

For the operational level, I have one piece of advice: Make operations--including the IT part--focus on the customer. As always, customer satisfaction will be the key to competitive advantage in the future.

Lassiter: In my company, the tendency has been to set the strategies and then determine how we can use technology to optimize them. This has caused us to overlook what technology could have done for us.

Michael S. Levin (Titan Industrial): CEOs have to answer the business question first, then the information technology question. And they need to win their employees' full support for the strategies they implement--something that usually only happens when new systems succeed--before they can develop the corporate vision further.

Russell Banks (Grow Group): We use a certain amount of technology in our operations--we make chemical, paint, and household products--but I want to lear more. So far, I've found out how to get a ticket cheaper from Peter Sontag and how to manage payroll better from Josh Weston.

Hall: The chief executive must learn how IT works and challenge his employees t buy into its application.

Dwight C. Minton (Church & Dwight): CEOs have to make it easy for people to change, so they can meet their customers' requirements. Give them incentives to use technology and change the way they do business.

Daniel: I agree. In addition, the CEO has to encourage people all the way down the line to become familiar with IT and to provide feedback on what's needed an what works. This will ensure the only audible voice won't be that of someone in IT. But the CEO also has to keep in mind that the whole object is to make a profit, otherwise there will be a bigger turnover of CEOs than CIOs. |Laughter.

Paul G. Kahn (Coleridge Financial): Look at what drives customers to buy your products and buy your competitor's products, and see where information technology can make a difference. Then use it.

Sontag: I'm in a peculiar industry, in that we've been using information system for the past 20 years. We couldn't function without computers.

As CEO, I must ensure that our vision is executed through appropriate tools and support structures that enable the people in the field to do what they're supposed to: Satisfy customers.

Shaheen: The words "change" and "re-engineering" don't adequately convey what i happening in the world today. We're in a period of transformation. Governments, societies, economic systems, enterprises, and markets are transforming. And so, we have to think in terms of enterprise transformation, which only comes about with the integration of strategy, process, information technology, and people.

CEOs have to think outside the box. As dreamers and visionaries, CEOs have to set their organizations on track to be different, to set the high-water mark. The worst trap to fall into is following the competition. If we're unable to build what we think the consulting firm of tomorrow has to be like, and someone else does, we've lost.