Implementing intra-organizational learning: an infrastructure to support business process reengineering

Business process reengineering (BPR) has been both heralded as an essential mechanism for competing in today's business environment and condemned as a financial and human resource drain yielding little if any value. BPR failures have frequently been blamed on organizations lacking the cultural ‘change management’ infrastructure necessary to support change. This paper proposes that an organizational learning culture provides an appropriate backdrop for affecting the change management necessary to implement BPR. More specifically, a phased process for implementing organizational learning and a technology infrastructure necessary to support learning is provided. Finally, examples of a learning culture and the resulting influence on BPR initiatives are provided from a single organizational site. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Cornwallis Emmanuel Ltd.