Understanding client value proposition to attract and retain them is fundamental to any strategy. Client Relationship Management (CRM) and data analytical applications provide the ability through the market data collected that helps in customer selection. Services such as telemarketing help in acquisition. Customer care applications help in customer retention and web services provide a new level of networking with the customers, collaboration and growth.

Operational excellence through improvement in cost, quality and responsiveness are very critical to any business. Enterprise applications such as ERP, SCM and other domain specific solutions play a critical role in improving operational performance. These applications help organisations to provide lower-cost, more consistent quality and more rapid processing times in delivering their products and services.

Innovation processes are very critical to competitive advantage and sustainable growth. Apart from using simulation and modeling applications for product innovation, IT can play a crucial role for new product development and time to market initiatives.

The extent of automation of these processes and specific applications that would meet the requirements will be specific to each client across various industries.

The impact of IT initiatives rolled out in isolation for each of these business processes would have limited benefits. Therefore, the organisation needs to build an enterprise application architecture, which would integrate all these processes and deliver unified benefits. The whole is always better than a sum of parts.

Any such alignment initiatives will have to be long-term and it cannot be driven by point solutions or short-term initiatives.