BPR — to Redesign or not to Redesign?

Recent excitement and hype about Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) fails to concern itself with many of the details of the phenomenon itself. The concept of ‘process’ is ill-defined, as are the mechanisms for initiating and completing re-engineering exercises. Furthermore, however much the originators and proponents of BPR may protest, BPR in use is seen all too often as a covert way of downsizing (itself a polite euphemism for redundancy) whilst simultaneously loading further responsibility and demands on those staff who manage to retain their fixed-term positions. BPR is associated with obliteration and ruthlessness, but not in quite the ways Hammer and Champy would have us assume. The authors believe that many criticisms of BPR are well founded, but that some of the underlying principles and motivations of re-engineering retain their value if understood against a wider perspective of ‘Goal Directed Development’.