The single greatest shortcoming of IT is the simple fact that the technology for the past 30 years or more has not been able to keep pace with the dynamic conditions surrounding any business process. IT professionals have historically spent months and year coming up with applications that reflect a particular business process, only to see executives get frustrated with IT because as the business evolves, the applications built by IT were unable to easily incorporate the necessary changes.

This situation has led to the creation of a massive divide between IT and the business where executives frequently question the overall value of IT investments. Building bridges over that divide is one of the cornerstones of IBM's ongoing Work Smarter initiative and the good news is that Big Blue is making some real progress.

This week at its Impact conference IBM showcased a raft of business process integration tools, the most notable of which is an offering called BPM BlueWorks, a business modeling tool that can be deployed on premise or invoked via a cloud computing service run by IBM. The idea is that IT people and business executives can collaboratively model a business process and then export that model to a set of IBM Websphere Business Events software to execute it. The model serves to configure the Websphere software to match the business process. Because the model essentially represents a higher level of abstraction above the core middleware software, it also allows customers to update the business process as often as required, which for the first time allows IT to be responsive to the rapidly changing needs of the business.

IBM estimates that 42 percent of workers are forced to make decisions using wrong information at least once per week. That basic information flaw then leads to tons of wasted time on meeting and the setting up of processes that eventually need to be recast once the right information is eventually discovered.

The ability to effectively model a process and then have it automatically executed by middleware software goes a long way towards solving this problem. There will always be cultural issues between IT and business executives. But up until recently there really wasn't even a place of them to effectively meet to discuss their objectives. The advent of intelligent business process modeling tools creates a place for those meetings to finally occur in a way that prove relevant to both parties. Hopefully, there will be a lot more to come in this space not just from IBM.