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GTE Telephone Operations knew it was not going to business as usual.
Under a new regulatory scheme, the telephone industry was about to take on the task of dealing with 50 separate state public utility commissions, each with its own price cap to impose.
For GTE--which, as a regulated monopoly, had become accustomed to profit expectations that made scrimping a low priority, the prospect meant a radical reversal. "We knew if we didn't get our costs under control we wouldn't make money," said Blaine Maring, assistant vice president of information systems architecture at the Irving, Texas-based company.
And when GTE went to analyze its business process information, it found that it first had to create a way for such information to be tracked and assembled.
"We had to re-engineer our processes and get to the core of our business," Maring explained. That meant examining every aspect of the company's telephone ordering process, from how it billed customers for service to whether its network could handle the increased traffic created by new customers.
The self-test also required analyzing the company's IS techniques and inventory.
But was GTE Telephone in fact reengineering? The answer depends on who you ask. Whether it's called re-engineering, total quality management or business process restructuring, firms across the U.S. are reevaluating how they do business--and how information technology can help them do it better--as they respond to increasing competitive pressures.
According to Michael Hammer, the IS consultant credited with putting "re-engineering" into the IS/business lexicon, that makes GTE Telephone the exception rather than the rule. Hammer, who is president of Cambridge, Mass.-based...