HP establishes business agility indexes (page 1 of 2)

Based on data gathered from business and IT executives at more than 300 global enterprises in the financial services, manufacturing, IT service provider and telecommunications industries, the vertical industry indexes allow companies to identify, prioritize and address high-value areas of business operation that may not be responding effectively to changing market conditions.

Due to the diversity of business sectors from which the data was gathered, companies also can compare the agility of their critical business processes and IT organization against others in their industry.

The vertical industry indexes are part of HP's Agility Assessment Service - the industry's only IT service based squarely on the concept of agility. Serving as a key initial step on the journey of becoming an Adaptive Enterprise, the indexes help enterprises establish prioritized, real baselines to measure and assess the synchronization of business and IT.

"HP's Agility Assessment Service is an important first step to helping companies take advantage of emerging dynamic computing products and infrastructures," said John Madden, analyst, Summit Strategies.

"What sets it apart from other assessment services is that it is designed explicitly to help companies define and measure both business and IT agility, to explore the links between the two, and uses a methodology that is geared to a customer's specific vertical industry."

The research that forms the basis for the indexes identified that, across industries, there are three main obstacles to achieving agility:

- Inflexible IT budgets to changing business conditions such as increased IT governance demands;

- Rigid, unsynchronized IT infrastructures that impact business performance in areas such as time to market; and

- A lack of integration across the key business processes that connect customers, partners/suppliers and employees.

After completing an HP Agility Assessment, customers will be able to measure their business agility against the agility index in their industry and will receive a diagnosis on how their business is performing ahead of competitors and where performance is lagging.

"In this competitive global environment, companies are more challenged than ever to determine how to effectively respond to changing business conditions," said Nora Denzel, senior vice president, Adaptive Enterprise, HP.

"Companies know they want to respond more quickly and effectively to change, however until these vertical industry indexes were developed, they didn't have a way to gauge just how much more responsive they needed to be and which business processes were impeding their efforts to be more agile."

Steelcase solution

Global manufacturer, Steelcase, a leading maker of equipment for office environments, was quickly growing through acquisition and was looking for a way to respond to changing business conditions.

To remain competitive, Steelcase realized it needed to drive complexity out of the business, reduce variable costs throughout the supply chain, improve return on IT, and balance investments between long-term growth and short-term performance.

"The assessment isn't just for IT, it's for the business itself - where we are strong and where we are weak. The whole point of IT is to benefit the business, so we needed to be sure we had the right practices in place to support the business," said John Dean, vice president Global E-Business and chief information officer, Steelcase, Inc.