In most business interactions, real time describes a human rather than a machine sense of time. In an aerial dogfight between military jets, real time better mean real fast, milliseconds to be sure. To the airline passenger whose connecting flight was just cancelled and who is trying to catch the next available flight, it could mean minutes—in time enough to make a difference is the key to real time in a business context. In such a business context, a working definition of real time can be put in everyday terms: “…in time enough to make an effective decision and act, and where a late answer or action is a wrong answer or action.”

The measure of time also depends on the context: the properties of predictability, fault tolerance and reliability all combine to determine the requirements for the system. Online financial trading will have one set of requirements, far different from obtaining online requests for proposals in the construction industry. They have different real-time requirements, but both need information in time enough to make effective decisions and act.

“… and act.” That’s the key to making the real-time enterprise real. It’s not enough to have ‘publish and subscribe’ event notification capabilities that can provide constantly up-to-date information; it’s the ability to act on that information, in time enough to make a difference, that’s the essence of the real-time enterprise. That’s where the breakthrough business process management systems come in. With the advent of the universal connectivity of the Internet and the new breed of BPM software, both strategic restructuring time and tactical operational response time can be squeezed, enabling a company to “act on actionable information” without the previously painful and expensive need to rewire their information systems.

• GE’s Jeff Immelt on Strategic Restructuring:When describing his company’s Digitization Initiative at MIT’s 2003 Emerging Technologies Symposium, GE’s Jeff Immelt, emphasized the strategic restructuring issue, “Information technology allows us to run the company differently. It allows us to make massive resource allocation decisions so that we can now apply more resources to things that we think are going to grow the company for the long term.” In fact, some observers describe BPM as a new form of Mergers & Acquisitions, for it allows companies to restructure inter-company operations without all the legal, financial and hassle factors, while sharing risks and rewards with intimate business partners.
• Alan Greenspan on Operational Response Time: “The same forces that have been boosting growth in structural productivity seem also to have accelerated the process of cyclical adjustment. Extraordinary improvements in business-to-business communication have held unit costs in check, in part by greatly speeding up the flow of information. New technologies for supply-chain management and flexible manufacturing imply that businesses can perceive imbalances in inventories at a very early stage—virtually in real time—and can cut production promptly in response to the developing signs of unintended inventory building.”