Focus On The Process

摘要

Hang around with a group of business-technology executives for very long and someone's guaranteed to say something remarkably close to this: "The technology's the easy part. Changing people and processes, that's what's hard." The importance of changing business processes to get full value out of IT investments is a concept that's been floating around for years, but it's taken on a new and broader urgency in the current economy. The huge investment in Internet technology in recent years, the demand for more real-time information, the tighter collaboration among business partners, and the grinding pressure to cut costs in a down economy all have IT buyers and sellers talking the same language about business processes. The new, interconnected world requires business partners to analyze and understand their companies' core business processes, then look for ways to transform or at least substantially improve them. Once they've accomplished that, they can talk about the appropriate technology to bring about the changes. "You give me good people and a great process, and we'll beat any organization with the best technology but a poor process and undermotivated people," says Doug Patterson, VP and CIO at Standard Register Co., a form-printing company with $1.2 billion in annual sales. Business process really just describes the way a company gets its work done—how it goes from taking an order to getting paid, or from selling a product to restocking its shelves. What's different about how companies approach business processes today is the way technology is woven into the efforts, creating the opportunity and the means to reorient often long-standing practices.