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Management Information Systems

Notes organizational boundaries, i.e., they occur across or between organizational subunits. One
technique for identifying business processes in an organization is the value chain method
proposed by Porter and Millar (1985).
Processes are generally identified in terms of beginning and end points, interfaces, and
organization units involved, particularly the customer unit. High Impact processes should have
process owners.

Example: Processes developing a new product; ordering goods from a supplier; creating
a marketing plan; processing and paying an insurance claim; etc.

Processes may be defined based on three dimensions (Davenport & Short 1990):
 Entities: Processes take place between organizational entities. They could be
Interorganizational (e.g. EDI), Interfunctional or Interpersonal (e.g. CSCW).

 Objects: Processes result in manipulation of objects. These objects could be Physical or
Informational.
 Activities: Processes could involve two types of activities: Managerial (e.g. develop a
budget) and Operational (e.g. fill a customer order).

13.2.1 Business Process Reengineering

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is known by many names, such as ‘core process redesign’,
‘new industrial engineering’ or ‘working smarter’. All of them imply the same concept that
focuses on integrating both business process redesign and deployment of information
technologies (IT) to support the reengineering work.

Business process reengineering ideas are based on the premise that every organization needs a
sense of direction. Without that direction in the form of strategic plans and business plans, the
organization has no foundation upon which to build process improvements.
BPR is a method of improving the operation and therefore the outputs of organizations. Generally
the topic of BPR involves discovering how business processes currently operate, how to redesign
these processes to eliminate the wasted or redundant effort, improve efficiency, and how to
implement the process changes in order to gain competitiveness.

The purpose of BPR is to find new ways to organize tasks, organize people and redesign
information technology so that the processes support the organization’s goals. It means analyzing
and altering the business processes of the organization as a whole.
For a thorough and effective reengineering project, organizations should first meet certain
conditions before starting such a project. Initially, the management should abandon all the rules
and procedures that have been used up to that time. In addition they should abandon other
inadequate organizational and production principles. At this point, the design of a renovated
and redesigned organization should begin.
Business process reengineering (BPR) is, in computer science and management, an approach
aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the business
process that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at
their business processes from a “clean slate” perspective and determine how they can best
construct these processes to improve how they conduct business.
The BPR movement arose with the publication of two academic articles in 1990. In the first
article, Thomas H. Davenport and James R. Short argued that the combined use of IT and business
process redesign could transform organizations and improve business processes to the degree

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