. It was popularised through
Business process
management (BPM)
capabilities.
Automating existing process. Often
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Part 3 Implementation
the pronouncements of Hammer and Champy (1993) and Davenport (1993). The essence of
BPR is the assertion that business processes, organisational structures, team structures and
employee responsibilities can be fundamentally altered to improve business performance.
Hammer and Champy (1993) defined BPR as:
the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dra‑
matic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost,
quality, service, and speed.
The key terms from this definition that encapsulate the BPR concept are:
●
Fundamental rethinking – re‑engineering usually refers to changing of significant busi‑
ness processes such as customer service, sales order processing or manufacturing.
●
Radical redesign – re‑engineering involves a complete rethinking about the way business
processes operate.
●
Dramatic improvements – the aim of BPR is to achieve improvements measured in tens or
hundreds of per cent. With automation of existing processes only single‑ figure improve‑
ments may be possible.
●
Critical contemporary measures of performance – this point refers to the importance of
measuring how well the processes operate in terms of the four important measures of cost,
quality, service and speed.
In Re‑engineering the Corporation (1993) Hammer and Champy have a chapter giv‑
ing examples of how IS can act as a catalyst for change (disruptive technologies). These
technologies are familiar from applications of digital business such as those described in
Chapter 2 and include tracking technology, decision support tools, telecommunications net‑
works, teleconferencing and shared databases. Hammer and Champy label these as ‘disrup‑
tive technologies’, a term still used today, which suggests how new digital technologies can
force companies to reconsider their processes and find new ways of operating. It is arguable,
though, whether technology is commonly disruptive in the sense of achieving major changes
such as those in the re‑orientation and re‑creation categories.
Many re‑engineering projects were launched in the 1990s and failed due to their ambi‑
tious scale and the problems of managing large information systems projects. Furthermore,
BPR was also often linked to downsizing in many organisations, leading to an outflow of staff
and knowledge from businesses. As a result BPR as a concept has fallen out of favour and
more caution in achieving change is advocated.
Less radical approaches to organisational transformation are referred to as
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