If you follow Cutter Benchmark Review, you already know that we experiment quite a bit with this publication. We have a standard process that we follow on most issues. The Cutter office and I identify a topic of potential interest to the readership. Then I recruit individuals who can provide an academic perspective on the issue and help frame the state of the art around the topic. They typically bring to bear both the depth of the academic literature on the subject, as well as their substantial analytical skills. At the same time, the Cutter office recruits someone who can provide the view from the field. Very often this person is a Cutter Senior Consultant or a practicing manager who has decades of experience and substantial practical knowledge on the subject. Finally, with our team in place, we run our benchmarking survey and ask our contributors to provide an analysis and a commentary of the results. This process typically yields an interesting and comprehensive treatment of a specific topic that leads to the development of tangible guidelines that our readers can apply immediately in their organizations.

While we are very satisfied with our standard process, here at CBR we are too energetic and too restless to simply apply the standard model. We like to experiment constantly. For example, we have two yearly surveys, one on IT trends and one on IT budgets, that, having reached their fourth year in operation, allow us to not only comment on current survey results, but also analyze trends over time and comment more precisely on the longer-range implications of such trends. We have also experimented with issues that were technology-specific: the issue on content management systems (Vol. 6, No. 4, 2006) and the issue on metropolitan wireless access (Vol. 6, No. 6, 2006) represent good examples of this approach.

This month's installment of CBR is also the result of experimentation. Instead of seeking to identify an issue of current interest or a current challenge our readers face, we take a look at a trend that we see emerging, even though it may not be a reality (yet) for many of our readers. This topic, that my colleague Rick Watson and I call the "digital data genesis capability," represents the notion that organizations must, in order to stay competitive in the future, develop the ability to embed digital computing equipment and IT in organizational processes to serve goals other than transaction processing, thus creating data in digital form and capturing it at its inception.

While I believe that digital data genesis (DDG) capabilities will soon become a prerequisite of successful operations in any business, in this issue we contextualized the survey in the manufacturing sector. We decided to do so mainly because, by their very nature, manufacturing operations very often rely on the kind of computer-mediated processes that are a perfect environment for the development of DDG. Pervasive computerization of manufacturing processes and the proliferation of sensors enable seamless generation and capture of data in their native digital format. While I am very happy with the decision to concentrate on a "futuristic" issue, knowing full well that our response rate was going to be lower than usual, I think I made a mistake in overly narrowing the focus of the data collection. In hindsight, we should have gone after a broader sample. Lesson learned. While our vocation will remain that of benchmarking current topics that are central to IT management and the priority list of IT shops around the world, you should also expect to see many more installments of CBR that blaze the path to new concepts, trying to evaluate their viability before they become accepted practice.

Our academic contributor on this issue is Claudio Vitari, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the Grenoble Ecole de Management and Program Director of MSc Management & Information Systems at EMSI (France). I have known Claudio for a few years now, and we are collaborating on a program of research focusing on the DDG capability, including its antecedents and consequences. Our practicing contributor is David Caruso, a Senior Consultant with Cutter's Business-IT Strategies practice, a 30-year industry veteran, and founder and principal of David Caruso & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in manufacturing, supply chain, and technology strategy.

Claudio's contribution focuses on the concept of digital data genesis capability. He explains the theoretical underpinning of this concept and, using a number of examples, how the DDG capability works to help organizations achieve superior performance. Claudio then focuses on providing early empirical evidence on the DDG development process. His analysis of the survey with this objective will prove particularly useful to you as you seek to recognize and foster opportunities to develop and take advantage of the DDG capability in your own organization.

As our practicing contributors typically do, David dives right into the data and his analysis of the responses. While Claudio takes a deep, narrow look on the subject of digital data genesis capability, David comments broadly on all the aspects of the survey that relate to manufacturing operations and IT in this current time of financial crisis and pressure. Specifically, he focuses on the role of the IT function in manufacturing operations with respect to its ability to deliver value by streamlining operations and improving effective data analysis and control. David closes with some guidelines for IT leadership in manufacturing firms that have immediate applicability.

With this issue of CBR we took a bit of a chance, looking to introduce to our readership a new concept. We did so in the context of a specific industry. While the number of responses is a bit too low to draw the type of tangible conclusions and guidelines we like here at CBR, I feel that this issue will prove useful to our readers in manufacturing. Moreover, I think that the digital data genesis concept that we introduce will resonate with many of you; I have no doubt that we will hear a lot more about it as time goes by.