With the current economic downturn, unstable financial markets and an uncertain outlook, executives and managers need to do more than cut costs short-term. They must create the ability to rapidly adjust to changing conditions, and more importantly identify opportunities to increase efficiency.

Business Process Improvement is one of the methods being used to drive inefficiencies out of business processes with the application of technology for good short-term returns and incremental successes over time.

It is important that the application of technology to BPI does not create the next generation of legacy and unyielding processes. One must address fundamentally the need to build agility and change capability into the infrastructure itself.

One of the most important infrastructure capabilities to enable agility is centered on information. Information is data combined from various sources and placed in some business context for a particular use. The ability to define the information products required to allow optimal business execution, and to modify the information products over time as the business itself changes or faces external change, is at the heart of creating an agile business.

Tying BPM, BAM, BI and even user applications directly to the data architecture or relying on traditional integration technologies results in difficult to maintain and sometimes impossible to change implementations. Building an infrastructure for managing information, whether at the department or enterprise level, is the first step to achieving agility and leveraging information as a strategic asset.

Taking advantage of the need to implement a change in the business as an opportunity to change-enable the business at the information management level not only solves the short-term need to deliver cost reductions, but also provides long-term value through enabling the business to use information as a strategic asset. optometrist software Buy Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe