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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The article titled, “How to Use Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture Tools to Thrive in a Recession,” first outlines four ways BPM software can allow for cost savings. BPM software can:

• Increase efficiency
• Maximize current resources
• Lower risk
• Gain greater visibility into dead weight

While an EA software tool can help organizations evaluate and make critical infrastructure decisions that can dramatically reduce fixed-cost expenditures and ensure that any reductions are the right reductions to make. EA software can:

• Identify duplicate or underutilized overhead
• Optimize your value chain
• Quickly and effectively assimilate mergers and acquisitions

Investing in these types of tools will ensure that you are well-positioned when the economy rebounds.

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