Business Process Integration

There is an excellent interview in the MIT Sloan Management Review and also carried by Wall Street Journal on Nov 30th.

In this article, Dr. Peter Weill is interviewed and he has recently co-authored the book “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain”. Dr. Weill believes that companies can increase the effectiveness of their IT investments by treating Information Technology as a strategic asset.

This article really hit home with our team at Adeptia because it articulates exactly the benefits of Business Process Integration that we make to our customers and prospects. Some of the key points (paraphrased) made by Dr. Weill are:

• IT-savvy companies use their technology to reduce costs today by standardizing and digitizing their core processes.
• IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies for two reasons: One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture. Those are the two sources of their greater profitability: lower costs for running existing business processes, and faster innovation.
• When we talk about an operating model, we’re talking about the degree to which a company integrates and standardizes its core processes. Integration, which involves providing access to data across the company, and standardization, which involves reducing variation in the company’s business processes, are the two things IT does better than anything else.
• The real secret to IT-savvy companies is that each project links together—like Lego blocks—to create a reusable platform. IT-savvy companies think reuse first.

We ourselves could not have said it better.