"Process Fusion" to Drive Strategic IT Investment in 2004

By Editorial Staff

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Companies must use the return of confidence in IT spending and advances in software to transform their businesses, Gartner argues


Companies must use the return of confidence in IT spending and advances in software to transform their businesses, Gartner argues







CIO Confidence in Budgets Returns









Business Process Fusion Why Now?







Improvements in Software Bring New Possibilities



  • Explicit process representation in integration brokers and portal frameworks

  • Service-oriented architecture and composite application technology that are delivered by integrated service environments and integration brokers for "wrapping" legacy systems

  • Metadata management and application-independent XML data definitions that are incorporated in integrated service environments and data synchronization tools

  • The development of common definitions for the main data items that are used in various industry sectors

  • Advanced portal-based integration that supports roles and personalization

  • Unified information stores and access methods

Achieving Business Process Fusion Requires New Skills











  • Departments work independently in most companies

  • Architectures are not flexible and planners are not mandated to build in flexibility

  • Modifying applications can be complex and expensive

  • Technologies for use of web services and application composition are immature

  • Seldom enough buy in from C-level executives to make business process fusion a strategic imperative



  • Organize for top-down driven, process change to extract the business value of IT

  • Invest to acquire process change competencies in IS team

  • Identify key end-to-end process change business opportunities

  • Set enterprise architecture policy to add only service-oriented architecture-based application software packages and components from 2004 onward

  • Enforce use of self-describing data standards and methods in all new systems and major enhancements

  • Require extensible metadata models for new applications

  • Treat hardware, network and systems software as a black box - focus management time and attention on the value creating business process change opportunity of IT




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