October 2006 Business Process Improvement Survey: Creating Smarter, Faster, Cheaper Processes is IT's Main Mission
By Allan E. Alter
Companies are turning to IT to help their operations be more productive, and their strategic planners and knowledge workers make better decisions.
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.
Finding 1. Improving business processes is the top priority for many IT executives, especially at small and midsize companies.
Most companies are hoping to boost productivity and cut costs by revamping their business processes with the help of IT; smaller companies are also aiming to increase revenues. Not surprisingly, that's spurred an increase in the number of BPI projects across the board. Integrating timely information into work processes is also important: 83 percent of respondents say one of their primary BPI goals is to deliver critical information to employees while they are carrying out the company's business processes. But CIOs aren't just seeking to improve operations like logistics and customer service; they are also looking to improve the ways that managers and knowledge workers do their jobs, since managers as well as rank-and-file employees are under great pressure to work more efficiently and effectively. Financial, compliance and strategic planning processes head the list of today's top three BPI priorities.
Finding 2. Although process improvement is a priority, the pace of change is moderate.
Companies rarely seek to radically re-engineer their business processes. Except for IT and customer service, 30 percent or less of departments are undergoing large-scale changes at this time. One red flag: The pace of change is slowest in engineering and manufacturing. That does not bode well for innovation or the health of the manufacturing sector. IT executives feel their own department is undergoing the greatest change. Whether objective fact or subjective feeling, it underscores the enormous changes that our August IT Organization survey revealed. We also found that the corporate IT department is actively involved in process change in most departments, though again not as much as in 2002—a surprising finding, given how centralized corporate IT has become.
