Product details

Rather than follow the make-and-sell strategies of industrial-age giants, today''s successful companies focus on sensing and responding to rapidly changing customer needs. In order to survive in this sense-and- respond world, big companies need to consider a strategy called "managing by wire." In aviation, flying by wire means using computer systems to augment a pilot''s ability to assimilate and react to rapidly changing environmental information. In a similar way, managing by wire is the capacity to run a business by managing its informational representation. Coherent corporate behavior needs more than blockbuster applications and network connections; it must be governed by a coherent information model that codifies "how we do things around here," and "how we change how we do things around here." This article describes managing by wire at Mrs. Fields Cookies, Brooklyn Union Gas, and a financial services organization that the authors call Globe Insurance.