For many managers, the stories seem like wish fulfillment. Within nine months, a retail bank overcomes the limitations of thirty-year-old "legacy" IT systems to launch a high-tech operation that offers its customers a complete range of banking services over the telephone. Another bank is able to roll out, within three months of an acquisition, information systems that deliver the same level of service to all customers at all branches, new and old. An industrial goods company succeeds in building the IT support it needs for order processing in the course of a nine-month reengineering project.

For these companies, IT has genuinely become an enabler of change that boosts competitive performance. How they did it, as well as the lessons they learned along the way, can be copied by others. The secret: a "hub-and-spoke" approach to building the kind of information systems that lend themselves to rapid, continual improvement.

The airline analogy

At the simplest level, an IT hub-and-spoke-based approach is much like the strategies adopted by US airlines in the 1970s and 1980s after deregulation intensified domestic competition. At that time, most airline networks looked like spaghetti, with cities haphazardly connected as local market opportunities emerged. Airlines trying to...