Changing the Focus of Business Process Redesign from Activity Flows to Information Flows

Current business process redesign practices, in the defense sector as well as in business in general, are based on several assumptions inherited from Taylor’s scientific management method, including the key assumption that activity-flow representations should provide the basis for business process redesign. While this assumption was probably correct for most organizations in the early 1900s, it is clearly inconsistent with the fact that, currently, “information” is what most flows in business processes, even in manufacturing organizations. The current focus of current business process redesign approaches should be on information flows rather than activity flows. (An action research study of a business process redesign project involving the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Computer Sciences Corporation supports this hypothesis.)