1. Old rule: Process-based clerical work and practice-based skilled work are different. Disruption: Process desktop. New rule: All forms of work can be described and managed using a single system.

2. Old rule: Processes are rigid scripts, focused mainly on the inputs and outputs of discrete steps. Disruption: Process calculus. New rule: Processes are fluid, dynamic, amoebic and adaptable.

3. Old rule: Executing a process means locating it in one place and under centralized control. Disruption: Distributed process execution and end-to-end processes. New rule: Processes can be as easily managed in a federated environment as in a centralized one.

4. Old rule: Collaboration requires standard processes. Disruption: Business process modeling languages. New rule: Firms are free to innovate because collaboration rests on a standard representation for processes, not a standard process.

5. Old rule: Companies have to start over. Disruption: Process discovery, introspection and projection combined with application componentiza-tion. New rule: Companies build on and transform what exists.

6. Old rule: Process must be kept simple in order to be manageable.
Disruption: Process participants. New rule: Processes can be as complex as they need to be, yet still be manageable.

7. Old rule: Processes have to be changed in order to reduce the manual checking required of accountants, auditors and supervisors. Disruption: Process metrics and process lifecycle. New rule: Processes can monitor themselves.

8. Old rule: A choice must be made between incremental process
improvement, and radical reengineering. Disruption: Lifetime process lifecycle management. New rule: There are no discontinuities.

9. Old rule: Incremental process improvements produce minor gain.
Disruption: Process analysis and transformation. New rule: Processes evolve in fits and starts, sometimes incrementally and sometimes
radically, but always non-disruptively.

10. Old rule: Radical change is painful and disruptive. Disruption: Com-puter Assisted Process Engineering. New rule: Replacement of organizational change with technological implementation.

11. Old rule: Companies need a large, dedicated, long-standing, reengineering team. Disruption: Process portal. New rule: Process management vanishes, becoming a part of everybody's job.

12. Old rule: Process innovation is an art form, with uncertainties and ambiguities. Disruption: Process calculus. New rule: Process management is a precise science.

13. Old rule: Radical change takes a long time to implement. Disruption: Process deployment and execution. New rule: Not all radical changes require changes to IT systems or organization.

14. Old rule: No team can reengineer more than one process at once.
Disruption: Process management system. New rule: Continuous process improvement across many processes.

15. Old rule: Radical change is top-down and continuous change is bot-tom-up. Disruption: Integrated process model. New rule: There is no distinction--circumstances govern the approach you take. Process models developed quite independently can be easily combined.

16. Old rule: Reengineering never happens from the bottom up. Disrup-tion: Process intranet. New rule: Insights for process streamlining and process re-design arise naturally in the business, and are readily accepted by those affected.

17. Old rule: Managers make all process design changes. Disruption: Collaborative process design and closed-loop process optimization.
New rule: Change-making is part of everyone's job.

18. Old rule: There must be a single process owner. Disruption: Collaborative process analysis. New rule: Everyone that needs to be involved in process improvement can be involved.

19. Old rule: Processes can be designed only by the process team. Disruption: Shared process repository. New rule: As many designers as required can be involved, deep within the business.

20. Old rule: It takes work to have to find out where you are in a given process. Disruption: Process metrics. New rule: Processes measure themselves and tell you where they are.

21. Old rule: Every process team needs a human coach. Disruption:
Process training built into process designs. New rule: Processes as couches.

22. Old rule: Plans get revised only periodically. Disruption: Process modeling language. New rule: Plans are processes, guiding the enterprise in real time.

23. Old rule: The only feasible processes are those supported by the exist-ing IT systems. Disruption: Process virtual machine. New rule: Any process can be modeled and executed; it may have nothing to do with IT.

24. Old rule: As few people as possible should be involved in the execu-tion of a process. Disruption: End-to-end processes, process data correlation, distributed process execution. New rule: Everyone and every system needed can be involved without degradation of automation or efficiency through manual hand-offs.

25. Old rule: Don't bury reengineering in the middle of the corporate agenda. Disruption: Process modeling methodology. New rule: Value analysis, process analysis, quality management and costing are combined into one analysis.

26. Old rule: Tradition counts for nothing. Disruption: Process discovery. New rule: Tradition is everything, and must be built upon. Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

27. Old rule: Design processes so that only a small number of variants are needed. Disruption: Process customization and process patterns. New rule: Any process can be reused to construct or constrain the design of hundreds, even thousands, of variants.

28. Old rule: A company has no more than ten to twenty processes of interest to process engineers. Disruption: Process discovery. New rule:
Organizations are more complex than they think.

29. Old rule: The processes to be improved must be carefully selected and prioritized. Disruption: Process optimization, analysis and transformation. New rule: Process improvement is built into the methodology; pain points emerge naturally.

30. Old rule: Processes must be designed to eliminate excessive information exchange and data redundancy. Disruption: Process data. New rule: Strong processes are those that include all required participants who can freely and efficiently exchange and re-process all required information.

31. Old rule: Work must be structured so that suppliers and customers can plan and schedule their respective activities in dependently.
Disruption: Collaborative processes. New rule: Coordination of independent activities is built in.

32. Old rule: Divide overly complex processes into a smaller number of simpler processes. Disruption: Enterprise process model. New rule:
Manage processes as intellectual property and derive what is required for execution automatically.

33. Old rule: Technology only participates in the process (as cogs in the engine). Disruption: Third wave. New rule: Technology implements the process (drives the pistons, orchestrates the cogs).

34. Old rule: Processes change only when people change them. Disruption: Capability passing, external process participants, business rules. New rule: Processes can change themselves within limits set by process design.

35. Old rule: Processes take a long time to design. Disruption: Real-time process manufacturing. New rule: Just-in-time, single-purpose, throw-away processes are both possible and useful and reflect the way business is really done.

36. Old rule: Changing processes across organizational boundaries is virtually impossible. Disruption: Process interface definition language and end-to-end processes. New rule: Process management knows no
organizational boundaries.

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