In an earlier life, I participated on a team that was redesigning IT customer support for a large company. As people were prone to do then when they needed to "clean-sheet reengineer" something, we hired a facilitator and retired to a conference room for a week of debating and bickering about trouble tickets, problem diagnosis, information routing, etc. At the end of the week, the facilitator and her minions disappeared to document our deliberations. They returned early in the following week bearing flow charts.

Over the past several months, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Paul Harmon has been studying the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as it facilitates business process improvement -- a growing trend. This month's Cutter Benchmark Review presents Harmon's research and analysis to help you determine how best to take advantage of the developing technologies that are enabling the integration of business processes.

Cutter Consortium's tag line is "Leveraging IT for Competitive Advantage." Integral to leveraging IT is managing the many relationships IT departments and IT professionals develop in the course of their work. Today's IT professional must be a people-person.