Overview

At the heart of business re-engineering is the notion of discontinuous thinking, of recognizing and breaking out-of-date rules and assumptions that underlie current business operations. Quality, innovation and service are now more important for survival than cost, growth and control. So processes that suited command and control organizations no longer suit service and quality driven ones and earlier assumptions of necessary roles are no longer valid.

During the post-war decades organizations need to funnel information to the handful of people who know what to do with that information but this funnelling is now obsolete and can lead to people substituting the narrow goals of their department or section for the overall ones of the organization of the process as a whole. When work passes from process to process, delays and errors are inevitable and hence large numbers of processes exist solely to expedite delays and repair errors, accountability blurs and critical issues fall between the cracks. The situation is now fundamentally different: large parts of the organization are educated and able and eager to contribute and to be empowered; IS [information systems] offers a way of doing this.

Managers have tried to adapt their processes to the new circumstances, but usually in ways that just create more problems. If, say for example, customer service is poor, they create a mechanism to deliver service but overlay it on the existing organization. If cash flow is poor, debt chasing is...