Business Process Re-Engineering

The idea of re-engineering was first propounded in an article in Harvard Business Review in July–August 1990 by Michael Hammer , then a professor of computer science at MIT. The method was popularly referred to as business process re-engineering (BPR), and was based on an examination of the way information technology was affecting business processes.

Michael Porter (see article) said:

The literature on re-engineering employs the term processes. Sometimes it is a synonym for activities. Sometimes it refers to activities or sets of activities that cut across organisational units. In any case, however, the essential notion is the same—both strategic and operational issues are best understood at the activity level.

BPR promised a novel approach to corporate change, and was described by its inventors as a “fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed”.

The technique involved analysing a company’s central processes and reassembling them in a more efficient fashion and in a way that rode roughshod over long-established (but frequently irrelevant) functional distinctions. Functional silos were often protective of information, for instance, and of their own position in the scheme of things. At best, this was inefficient. Slicing the silos into their different processes and re-assembling them in a less vertical fashion exposed excess fat and forced corporations to look at new ways to streamline themselves.

BPR’s originators, Hammer and James Champy, maintained that re-engineering had a wider significance than mere processes. It applied to all parts of an organisation, and it had a lofty purpose. “I think that this is the work of angels,” said Hammer in one of his more fanciful moments. “In a world where so many people are so deprived, it’s a sin to be so inefficient.”

Many commentators, however, saw re-engineering as a return to the...