MANAGING BY WIRE

Rather than follow the make-and-sell strategies of industrial-age gian ts, today's successful companies focus on sensing and responding to ra pidly changing customer needs. Information technology has driven much of this dramatic shift by vastly reducing the constraints imposed by t ime and space in acquiring, interpreting, and acting on information. I n order to survive in this sense-and-respond world, big companies need to consider a strategy that Stephan Haeckel and Richard Nolan call ma naging by wire. In aviation, flying by wire means using Computer syste ms to augment a pilot's ability to assimilate and react to rapidly cha nging environmental information. When pilots fly by wire, they're flyi ng informational representations of airplanes. In a similar way, manag ing by wire is the capacity to run a business by managing its informat ional representation. Rather than investing in isolated IT systems, a company must invest in the IT capabilities that it will need to manage by wire. Indeed, coherent corporate behavior needs more than blockbus ter applications and network connections; it must be governed by a coh erent information model that codifies a corporation' s intent and ''ho w we do things around here. '' More important, a coherent model must i nclude ''how we change how we do things around here.'' Companies like Mrs. Fields Cookies, Brooklyn Union Gas, and a financial services orga nization that the authors call Global Insurance are managing by wire t o varying degrees, froin ''hard-wiring'' automated processes at Mrs. F ields to a complete enterprise model that codifies business strategy a t Global Insurance.