Fortune Magazine recently released its annual “Dumbest moments in business” list for 2009. This year the business world saw enough absurd, nonsensical and even shocking moments to last it the next decade entirely!

Well, one can hope anyways.

Nonetheless, this year’s “winners” certainly faced some serious competition.

My favorite moment on Fortune’s list is number 18- Anthony Armatys being paid a six-figure salary for five years for a job that he didn’t even have (somewhat similar to the character Milton in the movie Office Space).

But seriously—this kind of stuff happens in real life! Although both of the salary mishaps are grotesque examples, costly oversights on a smaller scale happen every day. Added up, these can cause some serious problems—squandered resources, lack of visibility and inefficiency are wasteful at best and disastrous at worse (think about the banking crisis—if banks had a little more visibility it could have played out much differently).

So what can we learn from history to avoid repeating it? If you don’t have visibility and control over your simplest processes (payroll for example) then you could be in for some serious problems.

This is yet another reason why CIOs have made business process management (BPM) a top priority for 2010—BPM enables businesses to optimize their processes for increased agility while providing visibility into who is doing what and how resources are being managed—fostering accountability and control.

Who knows? With the functionality provided by BPM you could have one of the smartest moments in business in 2010—a much more admirable achievement.

Learn how one Metastorm customer used Metastorm BPM® to increase visibility, accountability and control across the organization while achieving greater enterprise agility and efficiency.

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