Profiling successful reengineering projects
James T. C. Teng, Seung Ryul Jeong, Varun Grover · Communications of the ACM · 1998
This article focuses on the concept of business process reengineering and its relevance in the modern scenario. According to the author, business process reengineering has been adopted by many organizations in the last few years at an incredibly fast rate. However, with experience, the feeling has gained ground that though IT sector is a critical enabler, implementing reengineering involves complex socio-technical changes in an organization. In view of the reports of a number of reengineering failures, the demand for knowledge is shifting from conceptual and descriptive analysis to research results providing prescriptive guides to reengineering practice. Further, the point stressed in the article is, that the strong positive relationships between radicalness and implementation success suggest that likelihood of reengineering success increases with more thorough and substantial change of the key elements of the organization. It is important however, the authors maintain, not to equate radical process change with the reckless overhaul of a process without considering its human and organizational consequences.