Examining Business Process Re-engineering: Current Perspectives and Research Directions. Gerard Burke and Joe Peppard (eds), The Cranfield Management Series, Kogan Page, London, 1995, ISBN 0 7494 1637 8, 320 pp. Price £18.95 paperback
✍ Scribed by John Seddon
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 286 KB
- Volume
- 6
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1086-1718
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
That business process re-engineering (BPR) has become an academic subject is perhaps a sign of the times. That much of this book is given over to problems of de®nition is perhaps a sign that we need to come to terms with what is happening in our organizations in the name of BPR. There certainly seems to be a lot of it about and if academics have a role, it is to develop our knowledge of what BPR is and what it could be doing for us. This is not a book for the practical manager, he or she will not ®nd guidance for what to do starting Monday; this is a book for students of organization theory. Though it would be nice to think that some managers too see themselves as such, for there is much to re¯ect on as one reads the collection of papers.
Examining Business Process Re-engineering is a smorgasbord of thought. The spread is heavily ¯avoured by information technology, but one ®nds welcome relief through the occasional contribution from the human sciences. With any such collection, papers will appeal to some and not others. I found Keith Grint's work a profound and relevant contribution. But I would, as my interests coincide with his: ``. . . to get there the drive for re-engineering will need to stop concentrating upon the operational processes in isolation from the way management thinks and works''. It is a vital perspective and one which is rare given the modern tendency to break problems down into their constituent parts when it might be better to understand them as integrated or whole.
Other contributions place BPR in the context of the authors' philosophy. BPR is compared and contrasted with total quality management, socio-technical systems, supply-chain management and operations management. Students of organization theory will ®nd these contributions to be useful introductions to these aspects of organization theory.
But back to problems of de®nition. Although many of the contributors re®ne and add detail, the Hammer de®nition receives working acceptance from most (``The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes . . .''). What no one seems to question is how our organizations became ripe for this phenomenon that we call BPR. Is BPR new or does it re¯ect the state of our