The millennium's birthday has raised our awareness of time and how it is changing. It seems as if the future is rapidly accelerating, and it has thrown our sense of timing out of kilter.

This issue of the Ceitronics newsletter is devoted to the notion of Internet Time, and what it means to compete to its accelerated beat. The cover story tells how Ceitronics is now being required to install more and more projects on a fast track, because of the high-speed needs of our clients. The center spread describes how the Ceitronics field staff is able, through experience and specialized training, to make the fast track work. A technology innovation timeline on Page 6 illustrates how the pace of change is accelerating.

So just what is Internet Time, and what's the best way for Ceitronics to manage it on your behalf? Internet Time is the concept that everything and everyone involved with the Internet moves faster than the rest of the world. An Internet year is often compared to a dog year, compressing seven human years into one. This is a concept that recently found legal backing. A federal judge ruled last year in an employment case that in the Internet industry, a one-year hiatus from the work force is "several generations, if not an eternity."

Michael Cusumano and David Yoffie, in their book Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft, view Internet Time as the telescoping of the normal phases of business development into amazingly short time spans. Close your eyes, and when you open them, the industry has changed. They speak of how to scale an organization on Internet Time and how to formulate "judo strategy" to move rapidly, stay flexible, and exploit leverage. Internet Time means you have to keep a short-term focus (while still holding on to a long-term vision), jump on opportunities, and provide super-responsive customer service without sacrificing quality. It means you have to be able to move rapidly to new products and markets.

More and more of our clients are facing the reality of operating on Internet Time. To respond to clients who are moving at top speed, Ceitronics has learned to stay flexible in strategy, structure, and operations. This means that installation and design projects that used to take us months to complete are now sometimes compressed into a schedule of a very few weeks.

Under this new timetable, we've often completed a job before the formal contract documents arrive. In the field, many of our staff function as their own engineers in order to solve problems quickly as they arise. They make decisions instantaneously in order to meet tight deadlines.

With the advent of Internet Time, speed has become the ultimate competitive weapon. It's necessary to keep moving and always stay on the cutting edge. As a strategic weapon, time has become the equivalent of both money and productivity.

So welcome to the new millennium and to Internet Time. It's here to stay, and it will only speed up.

Illustrations
1. People

Other Features
1. Newly Awarded Ceitronics Projects