In an environment where companies and consumers spend with precaution and the revenues forecasts are slipping, lots of companies and CIOs focus their attention on the internal efficiency to reduce cost and generate profit. It’s in aligning the operations and improving their efficiency compared to their competitors that a smart enterprise can improve its chances of success regardless of the market and act rapidly in a moving market.

Today, businesses ask their IT managers not only for incremental improvements in efficiency through automation, but also for strategic help in taking advantage of emerging opportunities. This often takes the form of architecting the business to work a different way – a more flexible way, a more real-time way, a more integrated way.

As IT takes on a more central role in strategic business moves, IT leaders look at business processes more closely.

Processes are how the business works; process change leads to business performance change . To answer the business challenge, IT analysts need to understand and drive innovations in business process performance at the same time as they work to support the process with the best technology.

In the past years, lots of organizations have been investing in gigantesque integration efforts in fitting their infrastructure and the underlying technology to business processes with custom codes. Today, these types of implementations have shown their limits.

ERP and CRM software package vendors competed themselves to push enterprises to adapt their unchangeable built-in business processes so-called “best practices” . As organization’s business processes needs are rarely taken into account, the business users needs specification phase becomes difficult and increases the resistance to change organizations business processes. The inadequate business process analysis and resistance to changes becomes the major ingredient for IT projects implementation and return on investment failures.

Organization’s business processes have been put aside and the software package with its built-in processes has been taking the first place in efforts and budget.

"Forrester estimates that 20% of CRM spending is wasted on overlapping software and a lack of coordination across operations… Companies fail to evaluate and change business processes to correspond with the capabilities of the CRM package”

- Information Week

Today, this entire “best practice” model is generally considered as obsolete; everyone understands that the business processes and the people of the enterprise are key before considering the underlying technologies. More than ever, business processes are at the heart of the strategies of enterprises, integration service companies, and software vendors.

From these concerns, several initiatives are born to canalize the general enthusiasm for the “business process based approach”:

• Integration service providers compete with “top-down” process based approach methodologies for implementing information systems that would support the specific business processes of the given organization.

If organizations are in constant mutation, products come and go, and staff turnover is more rapid than ever before, what are the core competencies of the organization? They reside in a combination of strategic principles (to make decisions about what and where to change), and strategic processes , that represent capabilities for execution . But to leaders who must constantly modify these processes (and their underlying technology) in response to market forces and feedback, it is not only the effectiveness and efficiency of the current processes, but the ability to deploy new and changed processes that is at the center of the organization’s capacity to respond, succeed, and grow.

“Real-time information flow within organizations and across corporate boundaries requires integration at the process level, as opposed to merely linking the technologies. That’s where I see most investment going this year”

- The Business Integration Journal

The process as it exists today is important to meeting today’s business goals, but is important to the future only in that it contains within the potential for tomorrow’s new process. The organization that can efficiently recognize the relationship between key business goals and the process that produce them , and then quickly implement the changes to affect the desired result, will position itself to adapt, succeed, and grow when the market presents the opportunity.

The bottom line is, that any organization that has built the capability of continuous (in business real time) adaptation will increase the chances of success .