The McKinsey Quarterly: What global executives think about technology and innovation

The McKinsey Quarterly: What global executives think about technology and innovation is an interesting article about executives, business and IT, and what they think about technology. A couple of points struck me as interesting.

1. More than half the IT execs (and nearly half of all the execs) see the ability to innovate as critical to growth.
   From an IT perspective, this surely means using IT resources to build innovate new systems not maintain or run existing systems.
2. Automating business processes was the greatest driver of operating efficiencies for IT execs and a close second for all execs.
   This focus on process automation, driving to straight through processing, is clearly a top driver of efficiency.
3. Talent and its cost was a top constraint for the business and for IT.
   Clearly the first two trends mean that IT must find, hire and deploy more top-tier talent to keep up with the need for automation and innovation.

So what can we conclude from these trends? Clearly a business rules approach, and adopting a business rules management system such as Blaze Advisor is one way to address some of these problems:

• Use of business rules tecnology is proven to reduce the ongoing maintenance work on systems, by empowering business users to maintain key components themselves, and that frees up resources to deliver innovation.
• Automating an complex business process requires the automation of business decisions within that process, something business rules technology does superbly.
• Using business rules technology empowers business users to make their own changes so reducing the demand for IT resources and lessening the pain from the IT resource constraint.

So, adopt business rules if IT talent and innovation are key issues for your organization.