All articles tagged: automation

Is Urbanfetch's demise a harbinger of doom for other Web-based delivery services? Maybe not, depending on their willingness to change and investors' willingness to wait.

Heralded as the corporation's savior, BPR was later condemned as a heartless, failed management fad. But perhaps evangelists like Michael Hammer needed to go even farther.

With his newest book, "Living on the Faultline," the best-selling management seer divines a Fortune 500 prey to the same Technology Adoption Life Cycle that convulses Silicon Valley.

In an exclusive excerpt from his next book, the former head of McKinsey Asia explains why Amazon.com, CNN and others have achieved an almost unassailable global dominance.

Knowledge Works: Managing Intellectual Capital at Toshiba by W. Mark Fruin (267 pages, Oxford University Press, 1997)

Few technologies have been so rapidly accepted as intranets. Effective at lowering costs and improving communications internally, they are playing key roles in customer support too. But they are also presenting fresh challenges, including how to apply the right amount of control to what is inherently a decentralized operation.

New software programs are now available that act as "smart filters" on the information superhighway. They can sort through mountains of data and find answers to specific questions. And they can learn. Their promise is to make the "horizontal" organization even flatter.