Business process reengineering: the need for a methodology to re-vision the organization

Abstract There is now sufficient literature concerning business process reengineering (BPR) to attempt to identify its central tenets. Analysis of these tenets using well-established theoretical frameworks suggests that the effectiveness of BPR may be restricted by (sometimes unrecognised) underlying assumptions. The limitations exposed by this analysis might be addressed by the introduction of other methods and approaches that are already well-developed and tested. Keyword Codes: K.4.2; K.4.3 Keywords: Social Issues; Organizational Impacts 1. INTRODUCTION In its more radical form BPR is a exhortation to reinvent the corporation, the alternative being to shut up shop and go out of business. For organizations to reinvent themselves they must adopt discontinuous thinking, abandon outdated rules and challenge fundamental assumptions (Hammer & Champy 1993). To implement such grand projects is not going to be easy and many organizations will be defeated by the challenge of turning the dream into a vision and the vision into a new organizational reality. Belmonte and Murray say (without identifying the source): 'statistics show that less than 45% of companies that try business process redesign are successful at achieving their intended goals' (Belmonte & Murray 1993). Although there is awareness of the organizational impact of BPR in the popular literature, the approach proposed is all too often to adopt a mechanistic approach in which both business processes and organizational culture are seen as things to be reengineered. In this paper we intend to show that such an approach to organizational change is inappropriate and that it should not be expected to improve the perceived success of BPR initiatives. The structure of this paper is as follows: - section 2 identifies some central tenets of BPR that are analyzed in section 3 by use of paradigms and metaphors in order to set up a caricature defining