BP1- Week 1- Question 2

In 1990, Michael Hammer, who was a former professor in computer science, wrote an article on information technology’s impact on business process. At the time, information technology was mainly used to automate existing work. But he Michael saw it from a different view. He believed that information technology could be used to eliminate non-value adding work in the existing work process. He classified all the work in the process in value adding work and non-value adding work. If a work in the process didn’t add value to customer, it should not be accelerated or automated, it should be removed from the process instead. At that time, some other scholars and studies revealed a similar idea. This idea, known as business process reengineering or business process redesign (BPR) later on, was soon adopted by a large number of companies. This was driven by the fear of being left behind by global competitions. This new concept was widely accepted and practiced by many companies.

After a few years of implementation of BPR, there were many criticisms on BRP besides those successful stories, because BPR focused only on efficiency and technology and disregard people in the organization. It caused massive lay-off of employees, which was lack of humanity. Criticisms also include that over trust in technology solution, under estimation the resistance of change, exaggeration of potential benefit and limited strategy alignment. By mid 1990s, some of the early BPR proponents including Hammer and Davenport published article of critiques on BPR. And there are some cases that BPR concept were abused and missed by others. All of these events cooled down the fever of BPR. BPR concept is still used as a start point of business process analysis and redesign, but it is not widely recognized as before in early 1990s.

Currently, business process management (BPM) is the focus of business world. BPM focuses on the combination of management and information technology by using information technology as a tool to analyze, design, control business process. It is not one-time revolutionary change like BPR, but a continuous improvement of business process.