IT is playing a major role in turning business strategy into execution. IT leaders are tasked with enhancing efficiency, while enabling innovation and strategy execution quickly.

According to AMR Research, "[most] CIOs are actively working to reduce the diversity in their application portfolios, forcing the business to standardize on a very small set of application vendors. Although some may complain that these policies limit innovation, they do promote stability and reliability, as well as reduce the cost of IT and business operations."*

With software and services from SAP and our partners, companies are:

• Increasing efficiency by consolidating IT environments and improving the execution of critical business processes
• Strengthening governance to improve visibility and manage risk
• Elevating performance management within IT to enhance accountability

Increasing Efficiency Through IT Consolidation

With SAP NetWeaver, you can consolidate your IT environment and improve the operational efficiency of best-in-class business processes. In particular, you can run applications enabled by service-oriented architecture – such as SAP Business Suite or SAP-certified partner solutions – from a single, unified platform. Furthermore, through enhancement packages delivered by SAP, you can continuously consume SAP innovations minimizing disruption to ongoing business operations.

Software from Business Objects, an SAP company, helps you to integrate data from SAP and non-SAP sources to increase visibility and insight. In addition, SAP Services delivers tools and methodologies that you can use to consolidate and optimize their IT environment.

Strengthening Governance to Improve Visibility and Manage Risk

SAP and our partners can enable you to establish policies that help ensure IT governance, deliver insight, and improve performance. Once policies are defined, you can track and manage risk with SAP's governance, risk, and compliance application for risk management and monitor key controls for business processes with SAP's governance, risk, and compliance application for process control. In addition, SAP NetWeaver Identity Management helps you manage permissions across heterogeneous systems based on user role, simplifying administration and preventing unplanned access. Supported by SAP Services, it helps you to achieve effective governance, manage risk, and meet regulatory compliance requirements quickly.

Finally, SAP solutions for enterprise performance management help you analyze business information to improve planning and budgeting, get business insight into financial information, and monitor enterprise performance.

Enhancing Accountability by Managing Performance

With SAP Strategy Management, you can define, communicate, and implement your strategy, while ensuring it is aligned with business needs and successfully attained. SAP Business Planning and Consolidation can help you better plan and budget resource requirements, so that your IT expenses are aligned with business demand.

You can use the profitability and cost management function within SAP solutions for enterprise performance management to accurately manage costs and cross-charging of IT services. Furthermore, SAP Spend Analytics enables you to monitor and control IT spending to achieve better value for money spent.

*Safety First: The Future of Enterprise Applications," AMR Research, Jim Shepherd, 2006.