Part I Tracing Business Processes and Transformation

The abundance of innovative concepts in the business world and their differentiated influence on business practices make one wonder what shapes these concepts. Taking the perspective that a concept evolves as an organizing vision for applying an innovation in firms, this chapter addresses one aspect of the evolution: how does the popularity of one concept influence that of the other? Studying the discourse on business process reengineering (BPR) in the past 15 years, I found that the popularity of BPR, at different points in time, was associated with the popularity of four other concepts: total quality management (TQM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), knowledge management, and e-business. The intrinsically related contents of these concepts not only explained their correlated popularity but also revealed a moving frontier of BPR. Historically, TQM served as a comparative vision for understanding BPR, and ERP offered a means to do reengineering. More recently, as traditional focal processes such as order fulfillment and software development have already been reengineered, knowledge management and e-business have helped shift the focus to knowledge-intensive and interorganizational processes. The chapter ends with a call for more research into the process by which innovative concepts emerge and business knowledge spreads.