IT Shows You the Money

Organizations turning to IT to drive profit growth will be the 7th biggest tech trend of 2011, according to Baseline research.

We’ve been tracking IT’s alignment with business and business goals since our first issue nearly 10 years ago. To add to our pleasure in the renewal of interest in security, we are also happy to see IT, and certain applications in particular, in strong demand in 2011.

Forty-one percent of the organizations in our survey are looking forward to increased use of technology or IT processes specifically to increase their organizations’ revenue; 45 percent say they expect increased engagement in business-process improvement in the coming year. BPI, in fact, is far and away the most-often supported technology by finance (31 percent) and corporate executives (35 percent), and it’s nearly as much in demand from end-users (26 percent).

Bottom-line applications such as CRM and ERP—though a bit less popular than BPI—are favorite investments in most companies where they are being used next year.

Chartis, a New York-based insurance company, has invested in IT solutions to increase profit and growth for more than a decade. Recently, it launched its OneClaim system with technology from Pegasystems to manage the claim life cycle from the initial customer call through adjudication and payout. “We can standardize and automate claims processing no matter what the regulatory jurisdiction,” says Alla Krasnopolsky, a manager of informational systems for Chartis. “Regardless of how small or how large the project is, we try to incorporate these technologies.”