The survey on business growth strategies found mid-size companies continue to prioritize automation of business processes, data analytics, and business intelligence as triggers to increase productivity and areas where they are most likely to make investments in 2012.
Some companies, like Google, even emphasize in their promotion processes that an engineer has to demonstrate ownership in a project, which incentivizes engineers to define and prioritize individual projects so that they can be the indisputable owners of those projects and increase their chances for a promotion.