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Issue 3.08 | Aug 1995

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The Battle for the Soul of Corporate America


By Art Kleiner

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Taped to the wall of a 15th-floor conference room in a nondescript Manhattan office building is a 20-foot-long hand-drawn maze, full of scribbled arrows and labels. It looks like a spec sheet for a vast, confusing network of cables, wires, and switches. But it's a map of something much less tangible, and somehow much harder to alter: the rules, habits, and relationships that make up a corporation.

A dozen people congregate around a table in front of the map. They're jovial and good-natured but preoccupied. The mood in the room is reminiscent of, say, the police bullpen in a detective movie, where everyone in the room knows a different clue and the only hope of solving the crime is to put the pieces together.

But up on the 15th floor, the culprit is the standard way of doing business.

"There are two supervisors in charge and they have 27 other projects to deal with," says Art Rutherford, with the kind of life-weary intonation only a New Yorker can muster. In his 40s, Rutherford's one of several wage-earning union members in the room; the rest are salaried managers. "So, when there's a problem, the first calls the second and leaves a message on her voicemail. Then she leaves a message on his voicemail," says Rutherford. "Everybody's blameless and everybody's to blame."

This particular corporation is NYNEX, the "Baby Bell" local phone company for the New York/New England region. But it could be any one of a thousand companies in which, under the rubric of faddish names like "reengineering," people are trying earnestly to reshape the way large businesses work from top to bottom. In this case, a dozen people have been assigned to reshape NYNEX's "Enterprise" system.

Enterprise is a network of reconfigurable high-capacity digital channels, delivered over fiber-optic cables. With an Enterprise line running into your house, you could easily switch calls from voice lines to video channels to image-frame relay to data service, just by invoking a software command. Unfortunately, it won't be coming into your house any time soon; for now primary customers include large banks, Wall Street brokerages, insurance companies, and law enforcement agencies.

Nonetheless, services like Enterprise are larger-scale prototypes for the sort of phone lines ordinary people might use in five to ten years, when digital fiber optics snake into most buildings in big cities like New York. And that's where the problem lies. Demand has grown so fast for Enterprise that it has been prematurely mingled with the rest of NYNEX's systems - old copper cables, old switches, and, most importantly, ancient habits and procedures. As one of the team members explains, "It's like having a rocket ship take off from a local airfield."

Internet celebrity James Gleick, author of Chaos and founder of the Pipeline Network, has criticized NYNEX (see Wired 2.11, page 115) for its difficulties delivering services like Enterprise. "The local telephone companies have the right technology for a business like mine, and they have smart people who understand what the right technology is," he wrote. "But they don't have a bureaucracy that's capable of delivering that technology to your office."

The NYNEX people on the 15th floor would probably agree. They work, after all, in the oldest of the post-Bell phone companies - the one Alexander Graham Bell himself founded - with its own history of stodginess. The ostensible purpose of this Enterprise job is to cut the time it takes to fill orders and fix problems, but that in turn means redesigning the system from the bottom up. And to do that, they have to understand the system as it currently exists.

The detective work is nitty-gritty, decidedly unglamorous. "We're getting into the Black Hole of Calcutta now," warns manager Ed Kimball, who formerly worked in network technology. Kimball can't avoid grimacing as the group begins to chart one particularly pernicious stage of the wall map.

For instance, it isn't enough to simply fulfill a customer's order as if it were an ordinary phone-line installation request. The existing circuits must first be checked out: can they handle data traffic, or must they be redesigned? The engineering management group has to get the requisite statistics, so it can plan for the network's growth. Somebody has to figure out which offices will get Enterprise connections, and who will be there to greet the installers - a complex task for an order that may link a financial-information company with the various bank branches that use its terminals.

Art Kleiner (art@well.com) writes, teaches, and consults about the edge between business and culture. His books include The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Doubleday, 1994) and The Age of Heretics (forthcoming, Doubleday). He works with MIT's Center for Organizational Learning and NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

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