COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development

1. School of Computing FACULTY OF Engineering COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development Week 9: Domain: Business Process Re-engineering (or nowadays - BPM) IS33 BPR/BPM

2. Background • Two seminal papers on BPR were published in 1990 by Hammer and by Davenport & Short respectively which sparked off an increased amount of interests in its concept, especially in the Western business world. • Hammer M, "Re-engineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Harvard Business Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 July/Aug, 1990, pp104-12 • Davenport TH & Short JE, " The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign", Sloan Management Review, Vo.l 31, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp11-27 IS33 BPR/BPM

3. What is BPR • BPR is ultimately about rethinking the core of the business. • It was argued that the traditional functional view of an organisation only looks at the responsibility and reporting relationships and offers little scope to measure or improve. Whereas processes have cost, time, output quality, and customer satisfaction and can offer clearer targets for measurement and improvement. BPR is … "The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed" (Hammer and Champy 1993) IT usually played an important role. IS33 BPR/BPM

4. Andrews and Stalick (1994) suggested that there are nine dimensions to business re-engineering. This is their model: A bit more to BPR than processes… IS33 BPR/BPM

5. The Culture Web Prof. Johnson at Cranfield School of Management used a web to illustrate the relationships among different elements which shape the 'culture' of an organisation: (see also Peppard and Rowland (1995)) IS33 BPR/BPM

6. A typical BPR approach 4 key phases: • initiating a project • raise awareness of BPR, allocate key roles, understand the key processes, benchmarking • defining scope and targets • analysis and re-design • implementation and on-going improvements Parfett M (ed), The BPR Handbook, NCC Blackwell, 1994 IS33 BPR/BPM

7. Process Streamlining- Harrington 1. Bureaucracy elimination - removing unnecessary administrative tasks, approvals and paperwork. 2. Duplication elimination - removing identical activities that are performed at different parts of the process. 3. Value-added assessment - evaluating every activity in the business process to determine its contribution to meeting customer requirements. Real value-added activities are the ones that the customers would pay you to do. 4. Simplification - reducing the complexity of the process. 5. Process cycle-time reduction - determining ways to compress cycle time to meet or exceed customer expectations and minimize storage costs. 6. Error proofing - making it difficult to do the activity incorrectly. Harrington H J, Business Process Improvement, McGraw Hill, 1991 IS33 BPR/BPM

8. Critique of BPR - Brown & Duguid • Over-emphasis on process and overlook knowledge • Only suitable for a narrow band of operations • Have a ‘linear’ view of information flow, not a true reflection of actual flow of information in an organisation which quite often requires collaborative problem solving • Assumed well defined input/output + targeted information, but in real life, ‘there are areas where making sense, interpreting, and understanding are both problematic and highly valued’ • ..see handout pp. 97-103 of B & D, Chapter 4 (but there is still a need to manage business processes – hence BPM activities continue) IS33 BPR/BPM