Broadening visions of business process re-engineering

Business process re-engineering (BPR) has become a popular management prescription. The fundamenal message of BPR is that through the redesign of business processes, significant performance improvements can be achieved. While BPR with its doctrine of radical performance improvement is a powerful message, experiences have been mixed, and this paper suggests that in order to overcome some of the problems the concept may need to be reconceptualized. The honeymoon period is over and preliminary speculations are giving way to emerging research results, reality is dismissing myths, while practice and greater understanding are advancing the boundaries. Through an examination of the research literature, together with the author’s own research, the paper argues that BPR is broadening in scope from its initial narrow, internal and analytic focus. This paper highlights how the concept is broadening and presents a number of themes which seem to best capture the emerging conceptualization.