IT Industry, Top to Bottom

Its been around one and half year that I am working with a company which deals in Enterprise Application or specifically I would say BPM. What I learnt about the IT Industry is that it can never exists alone, IT exists because business needs it. And in any business IT is implemented broadly at three levels. The basic idea here is to segregate the need for IT and how applications has been evolved one after another resulting from the demand for better and efficient business strategy and competition.
These days I am hearing a lot about the process and tools present in IT Industry. Though I don't have much exposure of tools other than BPM (or I should specifically say "Cordys"), here I would try to explain the different layers of Enterprise Applications which are currently in the market.

Data Storage
The First Layer is applications which are used to store data or which were used to support users to store and retrieve data easily. Data is the king for any business. You need to store all the relevant/irrelevant data generated on a day to day basis. This can be from your client or generated internally due to the different processes in the business model. The very first use of IT hence is to store all data. I would call this process as "Data ware Housing". Databases are used for the same but there are simple applications build over these for users to easily upload, retrieve data. e.g. of such systems can be P400 over IBM-DB2. Though there is basic logic involved in these system but they were not able to manage users activity and a big part of these are manual.

Process Establishment
As the business grew it was not the data which was difficult to manage, but the people involved and the complexity of process which demanded attention. Then a new layer was introduced in business to manage & streamline the ongoing process and introduce new process (when required, factors involved competition, client friendly, change in regulations etc ) . Applications over the existing system or new applications were built to address this issue. This particular layer is called Business Process Management. Tools involved IBM Websphere, Cordys etc.

Process Analysis & Business Intelligence
Once the process has been established,streamlined and managed successfully there was a need for betterment of the process. To analyse the same and make business more efficient and competitive. For this, existing system/process needs to be revised and relevant data has to be picked up. Various tools has been introduced to pick data in different forms. Logics has been developed in order to differentiate the relevant and irrelevant entities of a business. And a different kind of IT applications were developed which gave only analytics support to business and helped them know the flaw, demerits of their process. This particular layer contains the Analysis, reporting and presentation of the data in the best suitable form. So that managers can take better decisions. Tools involved are SAP Business Objects, BI+,

Top two layers are clubbed with each other and called Business Intelligence tools.