Paper

Class 3

Learning Objectives

Understand the idea of business process and be able to differentiate a process-centric organization from a function-centric organization.

Be able to explicitly describe the relationship of business processes and information technology.

Identify managerial challenges of a process-centric organization and suggest solutions to overcome these.

Hammer, Michael and Stanton, Steven (1999). How Process Enterprises Really Work. Harvard Business Review, November-December 1999, pp. 108-118.

This article picks up from the earlier article and paints a fairly rosy picture about the effects of business process re-engineering, suggesting that “it has in fact done a world of good” (pg. 108) while also acknowledging the criticism that it has received as a “euphemism for mindless downsizing” (pg. 108). Here the main theme is not so much the process-centric organization and IT support, but rather the management and coordination of process-centric organizations. Hammer and Stanton suggest that each process needs to have a process owner, a person in charge of the process, responsible and accountable for defining and executing the process. When processes are overlaid over existing organizational units, there may be conflict in decision making or resource allocation. In such cases, Hammer and Stanton argue, explicit decision authorities and resource allocations are required, that must be accepted by all participating parties. Hammer and Stanton's article also foreshadows the debate in Hall & Johnson (2007) when they address the question of process standardization and to what extent a process should be structured and defined across different organizational units (in the limit, each employee is an organizational unit). Finally, the article addresses transitioning to a process-centric organization, i.e. change management. We will revisit change management in more detail later in the articles by Champy (2006) and Hammer (2007), but Hammer & Stanton...