Reengineering

Conceptual Overview

Reengineering emerged out of a consultancy research project involving, among others, Michael Hammer (a former computer science professor at the Michigan Institute of Technology) and Tom Davenport, both of whom independently published articles in leading management practitioner journals in 1990 promoting the approach; these were subsequently expanded into popular management books. Hammer's book, Reengineering the Corporation, written with James Champy, the CEO of one of the consultancies involved, became a bestseller. Written in a highly evangelical tone, it presented reengineering as the only way that companies could achieve, maintain, or restore their competitiveness. Its subtitle, A Manifesto for Business Revolution, also emphasized the radical nature of reengineering. Rather than tinkering with incremental improvement, as approaches such as Total Quality Management had proposed, reengineering advocated the fundamental rethinking and thoroughgoing redesign of business processes so as to achieve dramatic performance improvements.

Although Davenport described business process redesign as an extension of traditional industrial engineering, drawing on similar systematic techniques of work study, Hammer argued that it was an entirely novel approach, overturning established principles of work organization that had remained unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. A common theme of both Hammer's and Davenport's approaches, however, was a focus on the ways in which developments in information technologies could facilitate the required organizational change. Many inefficiencies in contemporary organizations were seen to be the result of constraints, such as the sequential processing of purchase orders, that could be eliminated by appropriate investments in information technology. An entire chapter of Hammer's book was devoted to examples of companies that had made such changes and achieved order-of-magnitude improvements in process performance.

Another major theme was the need for visionary leadership (to inspire and drive transformation) and for a complete change in the nature of work in reengineered organizations. In common with other contemporary literature on new organizational forms, reengineering argued that employees should be organized in process teams rather than functional departments; that their work would be multidimensional rather than involving simple repetitive tasks; that control should give way to empowerment and training to education; and that performance measurement should [Page 1363]change from activity to results. Many of the examples of successful reengineering cited by Hammer also highlighted the opportunities for headcount reduction, and some of his rhetoric—comparing superfluous employees in an organization to fat needing to be ground out by reengineering, or likening the approach to a neutron bomb that eliminates people but leaves structures standing—was, at the very least, insensitive, as later critics (including Davenport and Champy) noted and Hammer himself eventually acknowledged.

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