I’ve pointed out to you before that the maximum amount of software any company can change in a three- to four-year period is two million lines of code. You now have more than ten million lines in your core portfolio of integrated systems. No wonder every redesign-related project your people tackle has expanded dangerously in scope to address everything that needs changing and then fallen rapidly off the track and further behind schedule as new customer needs emerge. Putting more bodies on the project will not change anything. If you stick to the road you’re on, you simply cannot get there from here.

As you know, many well-intentioned efforts to redesign or re-engineer a company’s core processes produce only minimal benefits. The reason usually has little to do with the variety or quality of improvement ideas and everything to do with the ability of each company’s execution mechanisms—in particular, its IT competence and delivery processes—to make real and tangible the value contained in those ideas. There is no point in loading up the "hopper" of an execution engine that is fundamentally broken.

Effective redesign means constructing information flows across the many functions involved in managing an end-to-end core process...