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Business Process Reengineering:

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BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING: PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE^ BRIAN FITZGERALD AND CIARAN MURPHY Executive Systems Research Centre, University College, Cork, Ireland. ABSTRACT Business Process Reengineering (BPR) advocates the fundamental examination and redesign of business processes, recognising tb-at the legacy of scientific management has been the excessive fragmentation of work practices in organisations today. This is reflected in the hierarchical structuring of organisations around functional departments, with individual aind departmental goals displacing overall organisational goals. This paper discusses the development of a specific methodology for BPR. The practical application of this methodology in an actual BPR project …show more content…

The latter orientation is one where real value may be added for the enterprise. Definitions of the term business process vary, but most researchers suggest that it comprises a number of interrelated activities that cut across functional boundaries in the delivery of an output (Bevilacqua & Thomhill, 1992; Davenport & Short, 1990; Thomas, 1994). The looseness of this type of definition has led to significant variations in establishing the number of processes in a business. For example, Thomas (1994) cites the case of one large bank which estimated that it had three core processes while another reckoned it had seventeen. In the past, information technology has been applied to help improve business operations. However, the technology has generally been applied as part of process rationalisation, that is, the primary motivation behind the use of technology is to automate or expedite existing manual processes, and the processes themselves have been largely left intact. The futility of this approach has been bluntly summarised by Drucker (1986) in his declaration: "there is nothing more useless than to do efficiently that which shouldn 't be done at all". The application of information technology has resulted in incremental gains, but this is still a long way short of the dramatic 10-fold improvement that has been identified as necessary. Also, the incremental benefits

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