BUSINESS PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING AND ITS IMPACTS TO THE PUBLIC & PRIVATE SECTORS
The current business landscape has change drastically compared to what it once was. Advancements in technology and globalization have compelled organizations to adopt a more dynamic approach to conducting business. These significant changes have influenced organizations to favor such characteristics as decentralization versus centralization, empowerment versus centralized control, and generalization of job functions versus specialization. In addition, the organizations of today are more accustomed to conducting business as flatter and more robust organizations versus the traditional bureaucratic hierarchy of the past. It to this effect, that organizations of today are favoring the use of re-engineering to change their business processes in order maximize their operating efficiency in order to remain competitive in today’s dynamic business environment.
The term re-engineering was first introduced in 1990 by Michael Hammer in a Harvard Business Review article called, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate Obliterate.” Re-engineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed (Cummings –Worley 668). In a world increasingly driven by customer, competition, and change, companies are on the lookout for new solutions for their business problems (Hammer – Champy 20). Business process re-engineering encourages organizations to re-examine the way to perform a process, or re-inventing the process as opposed to modifying it. Business process re-engineering is for an organization that is looking for a “dramatic” or significant improvement, ...