Week 5 - BPR basic (1)

Source / Reference:
1) " Business process perspectives: Theoretical developments vs. real-world practice" by K. Vergidis , C.J. Turner, A. Tiwari 2008

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527308000029

Subject:

How real business treats the perspective of Business Process and how it affects the implementation of BPR

Motivation:

As taught in Lecture 5, basic and general ideas of BPR have been introduced including the definition, rationales and properties with case study. We have been taught on the power of BPR but what is the point of view on business process from real business and how does this kind of belief influences BPR? I am trying to discover more in real situation and practice through writing this blog.

Findings:

Vergidis, Turner and Tiwari had precisely contrasted and summarized the main findings of literature research and conducted a survey targeted within the service industry to investigate the practice regards to key aspects of business processes. Based on their finding (figure 1), 64% of the respondents were still in traditional departmental segmentation and only 24% were organizing their company around business processes. This finding indicates that the traditional point of view of organization (departments are built cross functionally) still dominating majority of business organization in service industry. As taught in the lecture, we know that original view of organization structure in rather hierarchical and this kind of structure is a preliminary barrier of business process reengineering. It is not surprising that the authors also pointed out that only one third of respondents stated that process knowledge is shared among the main process participants and this would result in insubstantial understanding and decentralized co-ordination in business process enactment.

Besides, the researchers found out that the industry uses different kinds of business process modeling techniques (fig.3) to help finding out what is the company doing in current status and then make changes to improve it. Several kinds of modeling techniques have been asked on the participants in the survey but the responses in quite discouraging. It seems that simple flowcharts and documentation is used rather than some “advanced” modeling skills such as Petri-nets. The reason behind this perhaps is because of the complexity of those advance techniques. This finding is contrasting with the academic view of modeling, and as simple flowchart (which is lacking of standards) is being used, business processes are not easy to model, analysis and redesign. Although the perspective of BP is sophisticated, real industry is reluctant to adopt it.

Conclusion:

Although the concept of business process is developed for years and the theory of it is well elaborated, it is not widely adopted in real practice. It may due complexity of using BP modeling and the need of reconstructing the organizational structure. Though, I am not totally agreed with the finding of the authors. First, the research is focused on service industry which is not reflecting the facts in a comprehensive way. Second, the research is conducted years ago and the development of BPR and BPM has gone a far way. However, the traditional structure of organization is obstructing the business to redesign their business process is obvious. In order to conduct BPR, the Leavitt Diamond must be considered while reengineering business, that is, we have to consider changing the organizational structure, adopting IT and equipping people with adequate skills.