The Business Process (Quiet) Revolution; Transformation to Process Organization

Although research into business processes has been conducted earlier (e.g. IBM (Engelke et al., 1985) and CIMOSA (AMICE, 1989)), it was Hammer (1990) who first raised the visibility of business processes with the introduction of BPR — Business Process Re-engineering — in the early 90’s. In subsequent years, BPR has often been associated with drastic changes and downsizing initiatives, rather than improving practices and resulted in many failed reengineering megaprojects. The emergence of the Business Process Management (BPM) in the new millennium (post Y2K), has given renewed focus to the process promise and has been a quiet — yet solid — business revolution.