Into the Networked Age

"Acceptance of the need to change is the starting point."

"The heart of transformation are the three levers that must be pulled to institute changes that succeed and last: knowledge, process, and technology."

"Change is as close as a PC monitor, where the amount of time and effort interacting with computer-based systems continually increases in quantity and importance."

"Anything less than a sense of urgency places any organization at serious risk."

"For more and more firms, 'a winning customer experience' during each interaction with the business is becoming the value proposition."

"A firm's self-knowledge must be tied to knowledge of customers and their hierarchy of needs, the leverage point at 'moments of potential value.'"

"When a firm plans a major investment or change in its infrastructure, the customer is factored in as the ultimate judge and jury for the outcome."

"The common denominator is a realization that a firm's internally focused processes do not deliver what customers need and want."

"When technology is moving very fast and is driving customer needs, the top customer priority is for _products that perform better, faster, and more reliably than any others currently available_."

"For too many firms, knowledge is idle capital."

"Knowledge, when shared, can become the glue that holds units and people together."

"To be effective, a knowledge infrastructure balances processes, structure, and technology and has as its foundation the ultimate source and repository of knowledge: the human mind."

"The more people understand the setting in which knowledge is generated, the greater the chance that they'll be able to replicate the process and apply what's been learned."

"The proper way to view and handle knowledge is in terms of knowers."

"Competencies put knowledge to work."

"At full force, competencies push firms to seek out, recognize, and apply multiple ways to expand their power to compete successfully."

"Process leaders succeed when they have clear lines of responsibility and authority so that they can overcome silos and deal with goal conflicts."

"Management leads the way in creating a culture of process by absorbing, inculcating, and applying _the three C's of process: coordination, cooperation, and communication_."

"By identifying and focusing on high-level enterprise processes, firms can achieve better understanding of their operations."

"The effective process leader emerges as the one responsible for harnessing resources and know-how to get results from processes."

"Whether the driver is vision or operations, the litmus test of effective process-centric management is flexibility."

"When properly implemented and maintained, process management makes all the difference in managing a firm for growth."

"Companies are moving ahead successfully with information technology rather than hesitating in the face of any debate over a "productivity paradox.""

"What counts with customers is a company that looks outward as prelude to looking inward at what it can deliver."

"There is no way to generalize with assurance about the rate and types of change in IT."

"There is no escape: the steady and rapid advancement of processing power, storage, memory, and display technology has made possible new applications that affect all firms."

"Successful firms continuously perform the gap analysis between their current states and their desired futures."

"Wherever they are, leaders challenge existing ways of doing things, often experimenting and usually moving forward incrementally."