THEN: In 1987, Judy Reed Smith had a new doctoral degree and “a job with three gray-haired experts doing strategy consulting.” Her first telecom project, for a major international incumbent telco, was to information from sales person to installation. “We found the information was re-keyed through seven different software systems before provisioning was complete,” she recalls.

NOW: Today, she is the CEO of her own telecom consulting firm, ATLANTIC-ACM, which opened in 1991. In the firm’s benchmarking research, she is surprised to find telcos still are re-keying information from one system to another. “Cost controls have at least brought the systems down from seven,” she says.