Reality will not be still.
-Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy

Reengineering today is in a real state of confusion, with many different opinions of its real value. At one extreme, managers view reengineering as a management fad that never got off the ground. Another view is that reengineering provides a convenient explanation for short-term cost-cutting efforts. At the other extreme, managers point to reengineering as the key force behind the strong performance of U.S. industry during the past seven or eight years. As always, the truth lies somewhere in between. But where?
-Harry Kraemer, from the foreword to Reengineering Revisited.

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There was at the time, however, a contrary view to radical reengineering. Japanese industry saw things very differently. They employed the continuous improvement techniques of Kaizen (a Japanese word meaning "gradual and orderly, continuous improvement") to boost their competitive edge in all three critical variables of speed, cost and quality, and without the need for step changes in capital investment. Hammer and Champy, on the other hand, were extreme in their opposition to gradual approaches of any kind. They urged their readers to abandon long-established procedures, to toss aside old systems, to go back to the beginning, throw away or dismantle the old, to guard against assumptions, to take nothing for granted, to "reinvent anew," to abandon the familiar and seek the outrageous-their words, not ours.

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Davenport also correctly observed that "the breadth of research notwithstanding, process innovation, i.e. reengineering, is more art than science." The use of the term "engineering" to describe process innovation can mislead many to believe that "reengineering" is based on sound scientific principles. Nothing could be further from the truth, as those that experimented with the process of reengineering found out. The literature is filled with studies of the difficult experience of those who had to adjust to and live with reengineering and its results.
In addition, because reengineering provided no fixed methodology for developing new processes or process variants, and no provision for simulating them before taking them live, the new process designs were of uneven quality, and also their fitness for the business need they were designed to meet was uneven. Those companies and advisors that took up the approach, had to develop and refine what "reengineering" actually meant, since the vision alone counted for little. Guess what, these evolutions began to take on the characteristics of a continuous methodology, with more emphasis placed on measurement, feedback and control. Yet these add-ons were external manual "guides," not yet inherent to a single systematic approach.

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Early workflow systems provided a component of the path to execution which reengineering lacked. That path has now been completed in the third wave, encompassing even computationally intensive distributed processes. Until workflow management came on the scene, there was no general-purpose collaborative process technology that could support the interdisciplinary teams that were designing and adopting new processes.

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As the IT challenges that arose from reengineering grew, companies turned increasingly to a technological solution to implement best practice processes, with the rise of new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages. But the software technology of the era was insufficiently flexible to back up the many prescriptions of reengineering advocates. Even if new processes could be successfully deployed, the question remained as to whether they could be changed and improved thereafter. To this day, companies still seek easy answers to difficult process problems by choosing to deploy standard packaged software. They do so at the risk of creating an inflexible, commodity IT system, available to their competitors, and locked into a series of future changes imposed on them by technology suppliers--quite independent of the companies' own strategy and its chosen pace of change.

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Because they will be opened to computer assisted refinement as a result of the new focus on explicit process models--just like
3-dimensional CAD/CAM product models are today--processes will improve in quality. BPM will eventually emerge as an integrated process design system for the business as a whole, including product design processes. The next generation of product engineering applications, built on a database foundation today, will be rebuilt on a process foundation. Already companies are using process management systems in conjunction with product data management (PDM) applications. Companies will start to think of business process engineering as routine standard practice. In effect, BPM will assume the role in a business analyst's day that product data management plays in a product engineer's. Boundaries across all discrete application-centered activity are going to blur.

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Companies have always sought to achieve and maintain competitive advantage. That's just business. For example, when American industrialists were besieged by Japanese manufacturers in the 1980s, they saw, in no uncertain terms, that their competitive advantage had slipped away. So great was the pain that the extreme remedies prescribed by the reengineering school, made sense. Unfortunately, the IT infrastructure was not capable of fulfilling this prescription, so the advocates of radical change fell back on a talking-cure in lieu of the scientifically developed antidepressants that the economy needed.
Lacking any empirical foundation, "reengineering" lost credibility in the world of business. To an extent this was justified, as its most honest advocates have admitted, though they can hardly be faulted for lacking the proper medicine to cure a disease that they otherwise treated to the best of their ability. As we have seen, however, the third wave of business process management can be thought of as a way to reengineer reengineering, capitalize on the lessons learned, and profit from process.

Old rule: Bridge the IT-divide
Disruption: BPM
New Rule: Process owners design and deploy their own processes,
obliterating the IT-divide

Excerpts from Business Process Management: The Third Wave, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, ISBN 0-929652-33-9 Off-press November 2002, Meghan-Kiffer Press