The leading strategies for doing so among consumer-goods companies in the InformationWeek 500 are reengineering applications (91%), improving data integration (86%), and increasing automation (71%). Nearly a fifth of consumer-goods companies are outsourcing IT operations either offshore or domestically.
Though outsourcing didn't rank high, it continues to have appeal in the consumer-goods sector, where companies are particularly sensitive to costs. Among 21 industry sectors in the InformationWeek 500, the consumer-goods category ranked third, behind hospitality and travel and metals and natural resources, in percentage of respondents planning to pursue new global opportunities this year. Twenty-nine percent of consumer-goods companies expect to do so.
