These two articles from CIO Insight, one a case study on GE and one by Cap Gemini's Christopher Meyer speak about the benefits of real time enterprise.  There's a follow-up interview with GE's CIO, Gary Reiner as well.  GE plans to save $10 billion with their real-time management systems.  Of course, that remains to be seen, but its clearly a trend that cannot be ignored.  Meyer says its "unavoidable."  My paper on the "Road to the Future" discusses the tactical steps that an enterprise must take to even be in a position to use real-time management systems to drive business decisions.  Among them:

• Infrastructure (network, data center, server, and desktop) consolidation and normalization
• Security
• Enterprise storage
• Reducing the number of databases and normalizing schemas
• Reducing applications and creating multi-use applications that share data

Any enterprise wishing to emulate GE, Siebel, and Cisco's real-time management initiatives needs to take stock of these other issues first and solve them or they're just wasting their money.