Business Process Reengineering

Business Process
Reengineering

Important concept

Illuminates key topics

i303, Session 6
Fall 2003
Thomas Haigh
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

Term is no longer fashionable

Importance of process-centric thinking
Difficulty of integrating processes with
management and organizational structures
Problems of authority in process redesign

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

A Business Revolution

switched to consulting guru

business celebrity for a while

Rhetoric of revolution

Attention to Processes

Hammer was former CS

professor

Design rather than just accumulate

(As Davenport says, this is tied to TQM)

Exploit technology
Minimize organizational barriers to process

Put a single person in charge

Simplify organizational chart if possible
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

Quotes from Hammer I

Quotes from Hammer II

"American managers . . . must abandon the organizational

and operational principles and procedures they are now
using and create entirely new ones.... Business
reengineering means starting all over, starting from
scratch.... It means forgetting how work was done.... Old
job titles and old organizational arrangements . . . cease
to matter. How people and companies did things
yesterday doesn't matter to the business reengineer ....
Reengineering ... can't be carried out in small and cautious
steps. It is an all-or-nothing proposition."

Reengineering the Corporation

(quotes gathered by Paul Strassmann in The Hocus-Pocus

of Reengineering, 1994)
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

Simplify processes rather than automate

Old ways were good before

New technology means new
approach

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

Is a good thing
Some common sense stuff

trash existing business, rebuild

from scratch
process oriented view
engineer better systems

Insists new idea

"In this journey we'll carry our wounded and shoot the
dissenters.... I want to purge from the business
vocabulary: CEO, manager, worker, job." Forbes ASAP,
Sept. 13, 1993
"It's basically taking an axe and a machine gun to your
existing organization." Computerworld,Jan. 24, 1994
"What you do with the existing structure is nuke it!" Site
Selection, February 1993
"Reengineering must be initiated . . . by someone who
has . . . enough status to break legs." Planning Review,
May/June 1993
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

Quotes from Hammer III

Issues

"You either get on the train or we'll run over you

with the train.... The last thing in the world that
reengineering does is enhance the manager's
sense of self-importance, because one of the
things that reengineering says is that managing
isn't so important." Across the Board, June 1993
"Reengineering . . . will require a personality
transplant . . . a lobotomy." Computerworld, June

1, 1987

Who is the engineer?

Is a revolution a good thing?

"Don't try to forestall reengineering. If senior

management is serious about reengineering
they'll shoot you." Management Review,

Role of consultants
Centrally planned, autocratic, radical reform

Can reengineering be a one-off process?

What did reengineering mean in practice?

September 1993

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

BPR Fate

Also attractive to internal IT leaders

Term applied quite indiscriminately

Another important early BPR advocate

Picks up on two elements

Often used to justify any layoffs

Davenport Article

Ushers in great consulting boom

Association of BPR with layoffs

Iron Triangle of

Chainsaw Al Dunlap, etc.

Applied to all kinds of existing projects

Failure rate 70% or better

Backlash grows from mid-1990s

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

They know much less about the firm, even the

industry, than the people they are advising

BUT

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Also appealing to CIOs and computer people looking

for power to impose their ideas

General problem consultant have

the engineer is an engineer of processes and

organizational forms
usurps power of management
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

The engineer is a consultant

Engineer has unchallenged expertise over technical

work
Authority of engineer over management is limited
Engineers get promoted to management

Shift of power

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In this Case

Who is the engineer?

Consultants
IT vendors
Top managers at big companies

The most profound lesson of business process

reengineering was never reengineering, but business
processes.

Engineering as Metaphor

Hammer says that knowing the old way is a bad thing

Blank sheet of paper makes knowledge of
reengineering tools the crucial thing
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

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The Consulting Boom

Until 1980s, business consulting is small

business

Consulting Business Model

Technical/scientific (Arthur D. Little lead)

Strategic management (McKinsey lead)

In 1980s, business starts to boom

Multiple levels of employee

Profit comes from difference between billing rate

and salary

Much of growth is IT related

Accounting firms (Arthur Andersen, Price
Waterhouse, etc) are key players

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Industrial Engineering (Davenport)

Taylorism/Scientific Management

Try to build a profession around toolkit

Closest antecedents

Systems and Procedures Movement

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Balance between

Who is the engineer

What are they an expert it?

How to square with authority of managers?

Tendency for ideas to get trivialized

Role of hype, discrediting of good ideas

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Must accommodate/shift existing cultures

Cant bypass managerial process

Appeal to Computing Departments

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

Continuous evolutionary improvement

Radical, revolutionary redesign from scratch

Need to lead change within organization

Role of Consulting Firms

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Issues From This

Technocratic Mandate

Claim management methods as technical

expertise
Executives respect technologies, specialists
more than managerial generalists

Increasingly tied
to 6,computer
i303, Session
Thomas Haigh

Systems vs. BRP

Form Design; Report Design

Procedures Manual; Workflow study
Punched card methods, etc.

Generalist case hard to make

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

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Systems Men as Generalists

Some obvious antecedents

IT skills sometimes looked down on

Great faith in firms culture and training programs
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

How New Was It?

Big projects with lots of warm bodies are best

Repeat business is crucial

No experience required

i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

Partner
Associate (MBA)
Business analyst (undergraduate)

Often turned into technical sales pitch

Will see again in other sections of class
i303, Session 6, Thomas Haigh

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