With Phios technology, these professionals can leverage previous successful practices and creatively alter, extend, connect, and review business activities to improve their business operations. It is difficult to find a large, successful enterprise that has not made significant progress by updating and integrating their data company-wide. For example, many companies now have extensive customer histories available on-line for the service representatives who help customers on the phone. Compared to their use of data, however, most companies today are still very primitive in the ways they manage their business processes . Processes are inconsistent across applications, locations, functions, and divisions.
Few people understand how their work relates to the overall processes in which they participate.
Best practices and other ideas for improving how things are done are discovered and shared haphazardly, and often repeatedly re-invented in different parts of the company. In the same way that information technology has already helped most companies manage their data more effectively, we believe that the next big opportunity for information technology is to help companies manage their processes more effectively. In fact, we believe that many successful companies in the 21 st century will devote as much attention to managing their processes as they currently devote to managing their products. More and more companies today are already beginning to make the changes in culture and managerial mindset needed to manage in this new way. It is, of course, possible to manage this kind of knowledge in the ad hoc, haphazard ways most companies do today.