Business drivers are the people, information, and tasks that support the fulfillment of a business objective.  They lead the company trying to get it away from pitfalls and turn unforeseen mistakes into good lessons for future success and sustainability.

A business needs to be constantly driven and updated to be at par with its competitors and to be in sync with the latest trends in business technology which change sometimes very unexpectedly.

Technology is fast evolving and businesses that do not evolve with technology will suffer tremendously.  The world of business is a competitive sink or swim arena.  Every single day, a business is exposed to risks and challenges but this is just a natural thing. 

The foremost key business drivers of course are the staff and talents – the people.  Being the literal brains behind every business, people make and set the objectives, execution of critical decisions and constant innovation to move the business forward.  Human resources department are scouting for the best people in the business industry everyday.  Different people have different aptitudes so it is important to employ only those with business stamina.  While most companies prefer people with advance degrees specifically master and doctorates in business administration and the like, there are many people who have not even finished college but have innate skills for running a business effectively.

Technological innovation is another key business driver.  It cannot be argued that today’s businesses cannot function without the use of information technology.  Hundreds of millions of data are coming in everyday and for businesses to take advantage of these data to improve their products and services, they need use technology.  People alone, although they are the thinking entities, are more prone to error when it comes to doing repetitive and labor intensive tasks.  Compared to machines, people also work a lot slower.

Software applications automated daily tasks in the business.  Manual recording is a tedious and very repetitive work but a software application can overcome this problem with less error and faster processing.  And business is not just about recording.  Everyday, hundreds of computations need to be done.  Product sales, procurement, employee salary, inventory and other things need to be considered.  These activities involve millions of figures and complex formulas are needed to achieve precise results.  Individual results are aggregated with other results to come up with a bigger perspective of the company operations.  Tools like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Resource Management (CRM), Advance Planner and Optimizer (APO), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Business Information Warehouse (BIW), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Human Resource Management System (HRMS) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) are increasingly being employed by businesses organization to boost their overall performance.

The fast rising in popularity of open source and open standards has also been a significant business driver in recent years.  Open standards make possible the sharing of non proprietary so portability is has no longer become an issue.  In the past, integration of internal systems of a company was expensive because different computing platforms could not effectively communicate with each other.  Now, with more bulk of data being transferred from one data warehouse to another, open standards is making things a lot faster and more efficient.

Open source on the other hand allows companies free software or software with minimal fee and thus save the company a lot of money to be used in other investments.  Open source software applications are in no way inferior than commercial applications.  With open source, anybody can make additions to the source code so this can be a good way to customize software to the business archicture.