Digital nervous system

Digital nervous system is a phrase, popularly associated with Bill Gates of Microsoft, used to describe a vision for how the IT infrastructure of an enterprise could be analogous to the autonomic nervous system of a biological organism. Gates made extensive use of the term in his 1999 book "Business @ the Speed of Thought". The actual phrase "digital nervous system" may not have originated with Gates however, as it has been reported that Judith Dayhoff used the term before Gates did.
Steve Ballmer attempted to explain the digital nervous system by saying the following:
Gates himself offered the following explanation as part of a keynote speech at Microsoft's "Second Annual CEO Summit" in 1998.
"Digital nervous system" has also been described as being synonymous with the term 'Zero Latency Enterprise', another phrase representing the way an enterprise uses IT systems to rapidly communicate between customers, employees and trading partners.
History.
The term "digital nervous systems" was used in 1987–89 at the "IBM Guide/Share Conference" in a presentation originally titled "The Body Enterprise" later retitled "The Cybernetic Factory -- the next generation in CIM". The author/presenter Brian K Seitz was later a Microsoft employee and later a DMR Consultant contributing to Business @ The Speed of Thought through a series of interviews with his research staff arranged by a fellow DMR consultant Ricardo Buenaventura. 
Mr Seitz had developed the concept and an architecture for business design based on the General Systems Theory by Ludwig von Bertalanffy taxonomy while designing a computer-integrated manufacturing system at Rockwell Int'l NAAO B1-B division in the mid-80s before joining IBM.