Coping with contradictions in business process re-engineering

Introduction The campaign to improve organizations operates under many banners, including total quality management, continuous improvement, right-sizing, organizational transformation, and so on. The common goal for these approaches is to change how business is conducted in order to improve organizational performance. Since 1990, few treatments of organizational change or improvement have been complete without consideration of business process re-engineering (BPR). BPR's most fervent advocates, Hammer and Champy (1993), have defined it as " the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed ". In their view, BPR promises to transform organizations by fundamentally altering their core processes, thereby achieving radical improvements in performance. Practitioners have responded enthusiastically to BPR, making it the " hottest management concept since the quality movement " (Byrne, 1993). For example, a survey conducted by Deloitte & Touche in 1993 showed that corporate chief information officers were involved in an average of 4.4 re-engineering projects (Hayley et al., 1993). Another survey revealed that as many as 88 per cent of large corporations were engaged in BPR projects and that many others planned to begin projects soon (Bashein et al., 1994). In 1992, the worldwide BPR market was projected to grow at a rate of 46 per cent per year, reaching $2. Thus, re-engineering has quickly become, and remains, a very popular approach to organizational improvement. The preponderance of early writing about BPR appeared in trade and professional journals. While not all of this material was favourable, critical academic perspectives and empirical analyses were noticeably absent [1]. More recently, academics have provided both equivocal empirical evidence and cynical evaluations and analyses of BPR's claims and arguments. European academics have been especially critical, claiming that BPR is not a novel