By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

PAST GLOBE 100 RANKING 1997: 39 1996: 84 1995: 19 1994: 24 1993: 91 1992: 69 1991: 13 1990: 1 1989: 2

fter six years in the middle of the pack, Boston's Keane Inc. is back in familiar Globe 100 territory.

Keane, a major computer systems design and consulting firm, won second place in the first Globe 100 listing in 1989, and first place the following year. This year, the company just missed the top spot. And next year promises to be another good one for Keane.

The company is a leading purveyor of solutions to the looming Year 2000 computer crisis. Keane's solutions to the software bug accounted for 23 percent of 1997 revenues of $654.4 million a percentage that's likely to grow as firms rush to repair their software.

The millennium wasn't on founder John Keane's mind when he opened for business in 1965. The Harvard-educated Keane was successfully peddling IBM mainframe computers to corporate clients. Yet he couldn't help noticing that his customers often didn't see how to take full advantage of all that fancy new hardware.

''The technology was here, but the wherewithal for supporting this technology was sadly lacking,'' Keane recalled. ''There were not any companies that could bridge the gap between computer technology and the application of that technology.''

So Keane struck out on his own, offering his advice on how to integrate the technology into the overall business plan.

These days lots of companies offer such services, but few can boast the remarkable success of Keane Inc. Today the company has 9,000 employees working with many of America's biggest companies. ''It's amazing,'' said Keane. ''I'm surprised myself.''

It's a common corporate gripe that high-priced consultants often don't earn their keep and instead generate stacks of reports and recommendations that end up gathering dust. Keane takes a different approach - ''We do what we say we're going to do,'' is the way Keane himself puts it. When the firm designed a new computer system for the sales organization at 3M Corp. and when it revamped the technical support operation at Hewlett-Packard Co., Keane people didn't just come up with plans. They worked with the clients to implement those plans. And Keane's compensation is based on specific performance criteria set in advance. For Keane to get paid, it has to deliver.

So far it has, for its investors as well as its customers.