We've recently spent considerable time in IT organizations in the US and in Latin America dealing with aspects of IT financial management. Through the Cutter Benchmark Review, we've also conducted studies for four years about IT budgeting (see "Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value," Vol. 8, No. 7; "The IT Budget: The Centerpiece of IT Governance," Vol. 7, No. 8; and "IT Budgeting: A Management Perspective," Vol. 6, No. 8; take this year's survey, here). In all of this, we've come to understand that IT financial management, including budgeting and cost practices, is a very large and important component of IT governance.

Despite the branding, business process management (BPM) is actually not a new initiative but has evolved out of previous generations of both technology and practices. In this Executive Update, we examine the evolution of BPM using graphical examples. In particular, we provide advice about where (and where not) approaches and artifacts from previous generations can be leveraged in new scenarios, and suggest strategies for moving ahead.

For Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR), Cutter Consortium has conducted three annual worldwide surveys about IT budget practices, and, in 2008, conducted a worldwide survey about dynamic IT and the impact of IT governance on the ability of companies to be dynamic. The participants were global in scope (about half from North America with the remaining from other parts of the world). In 2008, Cutter Mexico conducted its own survey with Latin American participants using questions about both IT budget and IT governance. This Executive Update reviews those results. The purpose is to compare and contrast the Latin American results with our world results, making observations and recommendations along the way.

There are five things that everyone better do over the next 12-18 months: 1) rethink and (re-) develop your overall business technology strategies; 2) redesign and redeploy your computing and communications architectures; 3) rethink and re-implement your technology delivery strategies; 4) re-organize your technology organizations with special attention to business technology skills gaps; 5) identify and implement meaningful and measurable technology performance metrics. These five areas define the decisions that must be made as the business technology field fundamentally changes from the world we understood just five years ago. Is there some urgency here? Absolutely, because the nature of the changes we've been tracking is so profound that a misstep here could cost a great deal of time, effort and money.