The digital economy has placed unprecedented demands on organizations to react to changes in the marketplace with speed and flexibility. In an era where buyers can use their digital nervous system to determine who offers the best product at the best price, the ability to adjust quickly to meet customer preferences or adapt to a changing marketplace is a prerequisite for survival.

These changes can cause a major upheaval for an organization under any circumstances, but increasingly they must happen with more speed than ever was thought possible. Time-to-market in most industries has dropped from years to months to weeks, and in some cases, even to days or hours. Mass customization -- the ability to alter products to meet the needs and desires of individual customers -- means that companies in many industries have to be able to make a different product for each and every buyer.

This need for speed puts incredible pressure on the processes that keep an organization running. When the marketplace dictates that a company make changes to its products, the ripple effects can touch every aspect of a business: from sales reps who require updated information to financial planners who must factor the changes in costs and sales into their forecasts; from human resource departments which must make sure that the right people are in place to logistical planners who must work with suppliers; from manufacturing managers who have to retool production processes to line workers who have to learn new skills.

To succeed in this new regime, companies must learn new ways to manage their operational processes. That means putting in place systems that allow a company to take in information from outside, analyze that information quickly, develop intelligent new strategies, and then implement those strategies with efficiency and accuracy.

But simply adopting new information management systems is not enough. The key is integration. Information gathered by one department must be accessible to workers throughout an organization. In many companies, purchasing, manufacturing, and sales data resides on separate computer systems. Sharing information is usually cumbersome and slow. Real efficiency comes when systems tie into a seamless whole that allows information to flow swiftly to all parts of an organization.