Reengineering The Corporation
Reengineering The CorporationReengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, by Michael Hammer, James Champy (Contributor) ISBN 0-88730-687-X -- a book on BusinessProcessReengineering.
Card catalog description
"America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century." So write Michael Hammer and James Champy in this pioneering book on the most important topic in business circles today: reengineering - the radical redesign of a company's processes, organization, and culture.
Reengineering the Corporation offers nothing less than a brand-new vision of how companies should be organized and managed if they are to succeed - indeed even survive - in the 1990s and beyond. Reengineering does not seek to make businesses better through incremental improvements - 10 percent faster here or 20 percent less expensive there. The aim of reengineering is a quantum leap in performance - the 100 percent or even tenfold improvements that can follow from entirely new work processes and structures. Building on their firsthand experiences, Hammer and Champy show how some of the world's premier corporations use the principles of reengineering to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to achieve unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction, and to speed up and make more flexible all aspects of their operations. The key to reengineering is abandoning the most basic notions on which the modern organization is founded. Today's workers and managers are prisoners of antiquated theories about organizing work - theories that date back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. These ideas - the division of labor, the need for elaborate controls, the managerial hierarchy - no longer work in a world of global competition and unrelenting change. In their stead, the authors introduce the notion of process orientation, of concentrating on and rethinking end-to-end activities that create value for customers.
This book is about more than ideas, however. From their work with leading companies around the world, Hammer and Champy have learned how to make reengineering succeed. They lay out the approaches that have enabled such companies as Bell Atlantic, Taco Bell, and Hallmark Cards to reinvent themselves. They offer a vision of the reengineered corporation and a road map for companies to follow in getting there.
(From Amazon.com)
I've changed my actions by ordering the book. BPR is a buzzword in a lot of America's industrial companies, and many of them are actually trying to do serious rethinking of their processes. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to "sell" XP into the corporate environment, and the hook to something they know about and (somewhat) believe in, may be valuable. I'm also hoping to get some ideas to feed back into the XP process itself. --RonJeffries
As best I remember here is the definition given in the book (I am in the middle of relocating from England to Luxembourg and most of my books are in transit):
Business Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking of the entire business enterprise including the processes, jobs, organization structure, and values. The result is to produce significant results in all areas of measurable performance - cost, revenue, quality, cycle time, and service.
HammerAndChampy? argue that the four most important words in the definition are (1) radical, (2) processes, (3) something, and (4) something (like I said, my books are in transit). Of these, the authors consider process the most important.
A process is a business activity that adds value to the customer. This is to be compared to a business task, which may or may not add value to the customer. The authors argue that in the era of the intellectual employee, that processes, which utilize employees independent of corporate department, better serve the customer than tasks. Tasks worked great when the non-educated employee was the norm. An example of a task is deciding if a customer applying for credit has the appropriate credit rating; an example of a process is arranging all an entire order for a customer, including all financing. Further, the authors argue that processes should be done by as few employees as possible.
Of course, HammerAndChampy? make this much clearer.
The "formal definition" of reengineering, from Chapter 3:
I picked up the Hammer book thinking it would be just buzzwords, but ended up being impressed (both by the authors and how difficult good BPR is).
Even though I am an expert on use cases and would use them in BPR, just because they are my main vocabulary, I am suspicious about use cases in BPR. A use case documents a concrete process; BPR is about revising the process... since use cases don't mark the key events in the process as well as they might, the appropriate use for them is to show what you have before you start to invent changes, and to show what you have decided upon, after the fact. Something else is needed to help stimulate choices during the brainstorming. --AlistairCockburn
Computer search at Borders said that they're updating the book, to be released in June of 1999.
Another (quite unsubstantiated) rumor I've heard is that the authors retracted claims of the book, saying that they failed to consider the "human side" of the equation. (People's resistance to change?) -- JeffGrigg
EditText of this page
(last edited April 30, 1999)
or FindPage with title or text search