Business @ the Speed of Thought, Bill Gates and Collins Hemingway

When the increase in velocity of business is great enough, the very nature of business changes. A manufacturer or retailer that responds to changes in sales in hours instead of weeks is no longer at heart a product company, but a service company that has a product offering. (Location 82)

Though at heart most business problems are information problems, almost no one is using information well. (Location 90)

The gap between what companies are spending and what they’re getting stems from the combination of not understanding what is possible and not seeing the potential when you use technology to move the right information quickly to everyone in the company. (Location 99)

To make digital information flow an intrinsic part of your company, here are twelve key steps: For knowledge work: Insist that communication flow through the organization over e-mail so that you can act on news with reflexlike speed. Study sales data online to find patterns and share insights easily. Understand overall trends and personalize service for individual customers. Use PCs for business analysis, and shift knowledge workers into high-level thinking work about products, services, and profitability. Use digital tools to create cross-departmental virtual teams that can share knowledge and build on each other’s ideas in real time, worldwide. Use digital systems to capture corporate history for use by anyone. Convert every paper process to a digital process, eliminating administrative bottlenecks and freeing knowledge workers for more important tasks. (Location 166)

For business operations: Use digital tools to eliminate single-task jobs or change them into value-added jobs that use the skills of a knowledge worker. Create a digital feedback loop to improve the efficiency of physical processes and improve the quality of the products and services created. Every employee should be able to easily track all the key metrics. Use digital systems to route customer complaints immediately to the people who can improve a product or service. Use digital communications to redefine the nature of your business and the boundaries around your business. Become larger and more substantial or smaller and more intimate as the customer situation warrants. (Location 173)

For commerce: Trade information for time. Decrease cycle time by using digital transactions with all suppliers and partners, and transform every business process into just-in-time delivery. Use digital delivery of sales and service to eliminate the middleman from customer transactions. If you’re a middleman, use digital tools to add value to transactions. Use digital tools to help customers solve problems for themselves, and reserve personal contact to respond to complex, high-value customer needs. (Location 179)

The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose. (Location 206)

What do customers think about your products? What problems do they want you to fix? What new features do they want you to add? What problems are your distributors and resellers running into as they sell your products or work with you? Where are your competitors winning business away from you, and why? Will changing customer demands force you to develop new capabilities? What new markets are emerging that you should enter? (Location 219)

Digital nervous system won’t guarantee you the right answers to these questions. It will free you from tons of old paper processes so that you’ll have the time to think about the questions. It will give you data to jump-start your thinking about them, putting the information out there so that you can see the trends coming at you. And a digital nervous system will make it possible for facts and ideas to quickly surface from down in your organization, from the people who have information about these questions—and, likely, many of the answers. Most important, it will allow you to do all these things fast. (Location 223)

Even when you look at your existing business, it’s not always clear where the next growth opportunity is. (Location 233)

In many companies the middle managers can be overwhelmed by day-to-day problems and not have information they need to fix them. They may have reams of data in front of them—literally reams of paper reports—that are difficult to analyze or correlate with data in other reports. (Location 413)

A final sign of a good digital nervous system is how focused your face-to-face meetings are and whether specific actions come out of them. Pilots like to say that good landings are the result of good approaches. Good meetings are the result of good preparation. (Location 431)

Information flow is the primary differentiator for business in the digital age. (Location 443)

Unproductive meetings, or meetings that largely involve status updates, are signs of poor information flow. (Location 446)

All businesses focus on a few basic elements: customers; products and services; revenues; costs; competitors; delivery; and employees. (Location 462)

Each independent system may operate smoothly on its own, but the data in each is isolated and hard to integrate with the data in the others. What has been missing are links between information that resemble the interconnected neurons in the brain. (Location 472)

A digital nervous system serves two primary purposes in the development of business understanding. It extends the individual’s analytical abilities the way machines extend physical capabilities, and it combines the abilities of individuals to create an institutional intelligence and a unified ability to act. To put it all together in the right context: A digital nervous system seeks to create corporate excellence out of individual excellence on behalf of the customer. (Location 488)

If a consultant can find trends in your data that you can’t, there’s something wrong with your flow of information. (Location 501)

A digital nervous system gives its users an understanding and an ability to learn what would not be possible otherwise. (Location 656)

To begin creating a digital nervous system, you should first develop an ideal picture of the information you need to run your business and to understand your markets and your competitors. (Location 660)

It is sobering to reflect on the extent to which the structure of our business processes has been dictated by the limitations of the file folder. —Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering Your Business (Location 682)

Replacing paper processes with digital processes liberates knowledge workers to do productive work. (Location 687)

Do you have people moving information around, or do your computers handle routine process flow while people handle exceptions and value-added issues? (Location 965)

Do you foresee a time, I asked, when notebook computers become computer notebooks? I described what I meant, a computer notebook being a new device that enables you to take notes as you do today with a notepad and lets you carry with you all the personal and professional data you need. It’s another aspect of having all information be digital. This will probably be the last inflection point to occur. (Location 1015)

be prepared for the three fundamental business shifts that will occur as the result of all the digital inflection points: Most transactions between business and consumers, business and business, and consumers and government will become self-service digital transactions. Intermediaries will evolve to add value or perish. Customer service will become the primary value-added function in every business. Human involvement in service will shift from routine, low-value tasks to a high-value, personal consultancy on important issues—problems or desires—for the customer. The pace of transactions and the need for more personalized attention to customers will drive companies to adopt digital processes internally if they have not yet adopted them for efficiency reasons. Companies will use a digital nervous system to regularly transform their internal business processes to adapt to an environment that constantly changes because of customer needs and competition. (Location 1030)

the question on everyone’s mind: What should they do personally to get ready for this new digital world? I left them with these thoughts: Practice hands-on usage. (Location 1044)

health care has applied only 2 to 3 percent of its revenues to information technology, compared with, say, the banking industry’s 15 percent. Although health care is a high-tech field, the technology has been directed at stand-alone diagnostic systems, not at information flow. (Location 4443)

digital nervous system can make invaluable contributions in all areas of patient care: from emergency services through hospital treatment, patient follow-up, and long-term trend analysis. (Location 4478)

Whenever anyone in the hospital interacts with the patient, the encounter is entered into the same database. (Location 4542)

Every treatment, test, medication, and procedure administered at Children’s is entered into CareVISION, a patient information management system from Health-VISION (Location 4545)

Soon the hospital will add a decision-support module to alert medical staff in real time to treatment conflicts and duplications. For example, upon entering a drug order for a child, a physician might be alerted by the system that the medication interacts adversely with another drug the child is receiving or that the child is allergic to the drug. Or the doctor might order an X-ray, and the system will say, “We just ordered an X-ray yesterday. Do you really want another one?” (Location 4552)

When a physician prescribes a certain drug or treatment, the system double-checks whether the prescription is compatible with the hospital’s pathway for that problem. The system alerts doctors to new procedures they might otherwise overlook. (Location 4562)

Doctors dial into Sentara’s PC servers from their offices or homes to check patients’ current medical status and to read lab reports, patient discharge summaries, other patient news, medical reference materials, and insurance information. A surgeon might dial in the night before surgery to check on a patient’s condition. SpinWeb also enables a doctor to review, edit, and electronically sign patient documents via a PC from a remote location. (Location 4586)

Change will be driven by two groups: knowledgeable patients who insist on more information and more involvement in their own health; and Internet-savvy health professionals who use these new tools to provide better care. Together they’ll use a digital nervous system to turn the islands of health care into a single continent of integrated care. (Location 4704)

Are you designing your medical systems with the idea of patient data flowing seamlessly from emergency services to hospital to doctor? (Location 4716)

Do digital systems enable your professionals to spend less time on paperwork and more time with patients? Do your digital systems support doctors in their medical decision making? (Location 4717)

Can you easily provide patient data to another medical facility if your patient needs medical care away from home? (Location 4718)

Are you preparing for the day in the near future when patients insist on communicating over the Web? (Location 4719)

students are the ultimate “knowledge workers” since learning is all about acquiring knowledge. (Location 5122)

Schools need to shift from treating the PC as a subject unto itself—teaching about technology—to integrating the PC throughout the curriculum, teaching with technology. (Location 5128)

The tools of the Industrial Age extended the capabilities of our muscles. The tools of the digital age extend the capabilities of our minds. (Location 5447)

Digital tools magnify the abilities that make us unique in the world: the ability to think, the ability to articulate our thoughts, the ability to work together to act on those thoughts. (Location 5462)

Building a digital nervous system requires a well-defined framework for how to organize and roll out the computer hardware and network, how to make or buy applications, and how to operate the system on a daily basis. (Location 5545)

It’s better to start with commercial software and customize the package than to build a custom application from scratch. (Location 5674)