Gartner’s #1 Priority for 2009: Business Process Improvement

It’s no shock or surprise that IT budgets are staying flat this year – in fact, a recent Gartner survey of over 1,500 CIOs found flat IT budgets across North American and Europe with slight increases in Latin America but decreases in Asia/Pacific.

It likewise isn’t surprising that business process improvement is once again the #1 priority for businesses.

As Gartner’s Mark MacDonald says: “It’s time for CIOs to develop business process improvement capabilities as part of the core of IT. . .this will enable them to respond to executive expectations that see business processes as important to business performance.”

Continuous process improvement is a mantra that we at Lombardi stand behind every day, as we seek to drive cultural change and badly needed efficiencies across the business.

The economy aside, it’s nice to see that so many organizations are planning to take advantage of the opportunity in 2009 the re-think the way that they operate and find ways to improve efficiency, effectiveness, agility and visibility within their operations.  For more on that, look no further than our own Phil Gilbert’s recent thoughts in CIO Magazine.

Check out the Gartner report – it’s a great piece of research and worth a read if you want to see where many other CIO’s see an opportunity to build a competitive edge in 2009.