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Fistfights sure have changed.

John Wayne only needed one good punch to win a fight, and he was able to take some time to set it up. Thirty years later we have Jackie Chan, who delivers as many as 10 punches (and other blows) per second.

Let’s do some metrics.

The Duke was the clear winner in productivity, achieving a UO-per-punch rate (Unconscious Opponent) of between 1:1 and 1:3 as compared with Chan’s rate of between 1:12 and 1:100. He wins when it comes to efficiency, too – our contender from Hong Kong burns far more calories per UO.

Effectiveness, though, is different from productivity and efficiency. In hand-to-hand combat with a dozen simultaneous opponents, the Duke would have been overwhelmed, while Jackie Chan regularly emerges victorious from duodecimal combatant situations.

Business competition in the Duke’s day looked a lot like his fistfights – fairly slow, deliberate, each move carefully calculated. Today it’s more like Jackie Chan – speed rules.

We all know this. We’ve heard about the acceleration of business cycles until we’re tired of hearing about it. “Internet time” is yesterday’s cliche.

Two other trends — molecularization and service/cost convergence — aren’t yet cliches. Molecularization is the growing need to customize marketing, service, and product delivery — in other words, every interaction — to each individual customer. Service/cost convergence means that customers no longer accept the classic trade-off between quality of service and product price. Combine these two trends with time compression, and every measure of effectiveness changes.

In the old days, companies worried most about measures such as capital utilization ratios, manufacturing output, and defect rates. Their goal was to produce the most products with the fewest defects using the least equipment.

What matters more and more are customer-focused measures such as product utilization (number of products owned per customer), customer loyalty (the likelihood of a customer patronizing your company first), and customer affinity (a customer’s emotional attachment to your company). Other measures, such as shipping service levels — the delay between receiving an order and shipping the product – are equally important.

While the Internet is the most visible driver of this dramatic change in business, the reality is that call centers are still more important in improving these new measures of success.

For companies to succeed in this new world, information technology must permeate every process and activity. It’s possible to “pop” customer information, such as recent purchases and the 10 most recent customer interactions, on the screen of any employee interacting with a customer automatically at the start of any call — inbound or outbound. It’s possible, and your chief marketing officer knows it. When are you going to deliver the capability?

Unfortunately, many IS departments are still mired in the old business model, failing to understand that “late” is just as bad as “buggy” … perhaps worse … when judging the quality of software.

Why? Although some bugs are fatal, others are merely inconvenient. The business will still run while you track them down and fix them. Software you haven’t delivered yet is completely inferior.

It doesn’t run at all.

Correction:

Never confuse a spreadsheet with reality.

As evidence: A few weeks ago I discussed storage options for the 6 billion people now on earth. If you put us end-to-end, we’d only go around the world about 260 times, not the 2,600 times I claimed. I lost a decimal point due to bad parentheses. And a swimming pool big enough to hold all of humanity would have to be about 15 miles per side, not the quarter-mile I stated. One-quarter of a mile is the edge-length of a cube big enough to hold a “Homo sapiens puree.”

Thanks to all who wrote. And no, there’s no ironic tension between these mistakes and my suggestion that “fast” is more important than “bug-free.” These mistakes weren’t the result of haste — I made them quite slowly, in fact. I was just having a bad math day.

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I finally watched The Matrix last week. It’s a thought-provoking movie that asks three disturbing questions:

1. Does anyone call what Keanu Reeves does “acting”?

2. Has there ever been a stupider premise than the human body as the ideal source of electrical energy?

3. Does Moore’s Law make the movie’s basic premise inevitable?

We’ll leave the first two questions to Roger Ebert. Before we dig into the third …

Last month I asked what you envisioned as the center of your network, the mainframe or the PC. In other words, is the point of your network to connect terminal devices to the systems that drive them, or is it to connect employees to the resources they need to do their jobs?

The e-mail and forum exchanges on this question surprised me. Most unexpected was that nobody proposed putting processes in the center, even though the process view of the enterprise dominates consulting circles these days. The correspondents who proposed an “acentric” perspective also caught me off-guard, since to me acentrism means no design focus.

What bothered me the most, though, was how many respondents told me the enterprise “never stopped running on the mainframe.” This contingent disputed my assertion that a company’s work is performed by individual human beings, and that companies succeed or fail one person at a time.

On reflection, this isn’t a question of who is right – the question is which perspective is the most useful. With the mainframe in the middle you’d divide work into three categories: Data preparation, where people and feeder systems massage data into processable formats; The Work, which is what host applications do; and exception-handling, which is what people do with system outputs (since the system does The Work, it only reports the exceptions it can’t handle).

With Process in the middle, both humans and information systems fulfill roles in the company’s core processes, performing well-defined tasks that transform inputs into outputs.

Both of these perspectives can be useful. I’ve designed and implemented quite a few successful applications based on the systems-centric view myself, and as mentioned, the process-centric perspective currently dominates business design.

When you put the employee in the middle, though, several good things happen. First, you reduce overhead. Every time one employee hands work to another, entropy happens – work goes into managing the transfer of work rather than getting the work itself done. With a human-centered view you’ll organize resources so work stays on a single desk until it’s done.

Second, customer relationships will improve. When one human being owns each piece of work, the company has a chance of looking less like an impersonal machine that answers all requests with, “We can’t do that – it violates our procedures.”

To understand the third benefit, let’s revisit the basic idea behind The Matrix – that eventually we’ll all be slaves to one or more artificial intelligences. Just thirty years into the future, Moore’s Law will have clicked over twenty times, so computers will be one million times more powerful than they are today. One million.

No matter what the cognitive task, computers will be better at it than you are, so if the mainframe is in the middle, you’ll be working for it. Likewise for process-centered work – computers, being far more capable than humans, will do all the interesting stuff. (In the movie version, we’ll do nothing but cheap manual labor. Fortunately, Microsoft will have written the operating system and our heroes will take back the world when the blue screen of death happens.)

If humans are in the middle, we may have a cable going into our skulls (although I sure hope wireless technology has progressed more by then) but it will be to augment our abilities, not to boss us around.

Okay, this is the stuff of a summer movie, and your choices today will neither save nor destroy the world two decades from now. My point is to illustrate the third benefit of putting humans in the middle of your system designs – you’ll help make your company a better place to work.

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