Business Process Reengineering Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Business Process Reengineering - Essay Example Failure of the traditional approaches to effectively address the new conditions led to emergence of innovative perspectives on organizational performance and change with BPR being perhaps the most popular among them. Another distinct feature of the business environment in the early 1990s was the dramatic rise in amounts spent by businesses on information technology (IT), and the linkage between IT and BPR soon became the most popular object of research. Some studies published throughout the first half of 1990s estimated "over half of all reengineering efforts are initiated because of a perceived information technology opportunity" (Caldwell, 1994: 50), and pronounced IT to be the key enabler of effective BRP (Weicher et al, 1995). Although the linkage between IT and BPR has been confirmed repeatedly, there is no clarity as to the aspects of this linkage. The variety of opinions and views expressed in the literature is astonishing ranging from denial of the enabling role of IT in BPR to claims that IT is, in fact, the only enabler of BPR. The below overview seeks to summarise the existing conceptions about the relationship between IT and BPR in order to understand the merit of Information Technology as an enabler to Business Process Re-engineering Main Body In 1990, Michael Hammer published an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which he claimed that the major challenge for managers is to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for automating it (Hammer 1990). The article was perhaps the first attempt to draw attention of the scholarly community to the problem of information technology (IT) role in BPR. Hammer implicitly accused the management of contemporary businesses of the wrong application of IT which has been used mostly for automating existing practices than rather than revising the obsolete non-value adding ones. Hammer (1990) claims that the potential of IT makes it the most essential enabler of BPR in modern environment, but in order to fulfil the enabling function it must be used as a tool to challenge the traditional conceptions of the business processes that had emerged in the past before the advent and expansion the computer and communications technology. This will result in recognition and breaking away "from the outdated rules and fundamental assumptions underlying operations... These rules of work design are based on assumptions about technology, people, and organizational goals that no longer hold" (p.105). The elements of redesign models described in the early BRP literature illustrate why modern IT plays an important role in the reengineering concept. Hammer (1990) identifies the following basic principles of reengineering: (a) Organization around process outcomes, not tasks; (b) Those who use the output of the process must perform the process; (c) Subsume information processing work into the real work that produces the information; (d) Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized; (e) Link parallel activities instead of integrating their results; (f) Put the decision