October 2006 Business Process Improvement Survey: Creating Smarter, Faster, Cheaper Processes is IT

One of the most important lessons from the last 25 years of business computing is that you can't throw technology at a problem and expect it to go away, or fling a system at an opportunity and expect the dollars to rain down. To get any real value, business processes—how people work, how work is organized, how work flows—have to be changed, too. That lesson has been absorbed, judging by the results of our first survey on business process improvement since 2003. Process improvement has emerged as the top business priority for IT organizations; improving productivity and reducing costs as the most common goal. IT isn't just focusing on blue collar work and customer service; white-collar work like compliance and planning is also a target of IT's process improvement efforts. However, while process improvement is a top priority, companies rarely seek to radically re-engineer their business processes. We'll be releasing more findings from the survey each Wednesday this month; see below for the full schedule.

Upcoming results from the Business Process Improvement survey:

Oct. 25: Lack of cross-functional cooperation thwarts BPI efforts; the problem children of process improvement.

For more data and analysis, see CIO Insight's Research Center blog at go.cioinsight.com/researchcentral.

Next page: Improving business processes is the top priority for many IT executives, especially at small and midsize companies.

Next: ' Improving business processes is ' >>

test

>>> More Past News Articles          >>> More By Allan Alter