The Gartner Group calls it the “Zero Latency Enterprise.” Regis McKenna’s new book is titled Real Time.

McDonald’s asks “Want fries with that?”

Although McDonald’s doesn’t dominate the fast food business the way Microsoft dominates the desktop, it’s been stunningly and consistently successful over the years, even though its food is about as good as Microsoft’s software (but don’t push the metaphor, please – I’ve never found a bug in a Big Mac).

One reason for McDonald’s success is that a long time ago it realized that customers don’t care that much about flavor. Speed matters a lot – McDonald’s customers want their food in real time, with zero latency between ordering and eating. They want a clean restaurant to eat in. They don’t want to spend a lot. They want to keep the kids happy.

And oh, by the way … actually eating the food shouldn’t be unpleasant.

I have a lot of respect for Regis McKenna, and have even gained one or two useful insights from the Gartner Group. You can learn a lot from McDonald’s, though, which figured it out long before RM or GG, and you can learn it for a lot less money. Not only that, you can get a Happy Meal in the bargain. For example:

• Training: McDonald’s doesn’t leave things to chance – Hamburger U may sound funny, but it’s one of the reasons eating at McDonald’s doesn’t lead to unpleasant surprises. Is the training you give your leaders as effective as Hamburger U? If not, why not? The products you deliver are a lot more complicated than a Breakfast Burrito.

• Leverage: People get all gooey about how the plains Indians used the bison so efficiently, but McDonald’s puts them to shame. When McDonald’s buys a cow, the entire cow – skin, meat, bones and hooves – gets put to productive use. In IS, leverage comes from reuse. Do you create libraries of reusable subroutines or objects? Do you require developers to learn what’s in it?

• Procedures: There are lots of ways an employee could assemble a Quarter Pounder, but there’s only one way a McDonald’s employee does assemble a Quarter Pounder. When it comes to your core processes – tasks employees do over and over again – do your employees do things by the numbers? Or do they waste time trying to figure out the solutions to problems that have long-since been solved?

• Willingness to customize: My youngest, Erin, asks for a fish sandwich with “… only the bun, the fish, and the sauce, please. Nothing else.” And that’s what she gets. We spend a lot of time in IS worrying about enterprise-scale problems, but the single biggest difficulty we have is helping small constituencies with specialized needs. Do you know how to help a small group solve a small problem, or do you tell them, “That violates our standards,” or “We won’t solve it for you and we won’t let you buy the tools you need to solve it yourselves, either”?

• Hiring old people: Think there’s a labor shortage in IS? Compared to the food industry, you have it easy. McDonald’s hires old people. It hires young people. It hires recent immigrants with poor language skills. It even hires the cognitively challenged. It meshes its staffing needs with their scheduling limitations, it helps every new employee find a way to succeed, it pays enough to attract them all, and it makes each McDonald’s a decent place to work, too. Meanwhile, lots of IS shops practice age discrimination, screen out anyone without a computer science degree, and never consider hiring high school students to work the help desk part-time, even though they know PCs better than most “IS professionals” and would kill for the job, besides.

• Killing bad ideas: The Arch Deluxe didn’t sell, and McDonald’s unceremoniously took it off the market. What really bad idea is still floating around your organization because nobody is willing to put a bullet into it?

And then there’s the issue that started this column, speed. Anything that might slow down a McDonald’s employee in delivering an Egg McMuffin to a customer isn’t there in the first place.