Chapter 5

When Is the Right Time?

If I have the right data and I send it to the right place, but it arrives 2 days after I need it, do I have a good information system?

Ask FedEx, ranked 73rd on the 2011 Fortune 500 list, why they are successful. Rob Carter, the CIO of FedEx in response to the question “What business are you in?” said the following:

I believe we engineer time. I believe that as the world shrinks and changes, we offer solutions that allow you to engineer time to make things happen along time schedules that weren’t possible.

(Taken from an interview with Rob Carter, CIO of FedEx by Geoffrey Colvin, FORTUNE senior editor at large, March 20, 2006)

Engineering time is no longer just a FedEx thing. Now every company must ...

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