Enterprise Architecture

Business Process Reengineering & EA

Extract from a paper presented by Dennis A Stevenson to the Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town , in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Commerce in Information Systems, June 1995. Copyright subsists in this material.

[Page Administration ] [IS World Net Navigation Map ]

Note: for references cited in this section see “references ”.

Business Process Reengineering & EA

Hammer (1992) initially defined Business Process Reengineering as : “A fundamental rethinking and the radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in service, speed, quality and cost effectiveness”. To this he added the rider: “Reengineering is not about miscellaneous radical change. Reengineering is very much integrated with the idea of a process-oriented and process-managed organisation.” The great importance of this latter point became more evident over time.

The definition then changed to: “The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of an entire business system to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance (cost, quality, capital, service, speed). (Hammer, 1994)

Two important tasks within BPR are to model the existing process and model the desired future process. Applying Hammer’s latter definition these tasks would be expanded to creating models of the entire business system, both current and future.

This task falls completely within the scope of Enterprise Architecture. A complete and well defined Enterprise Architecture will model not only the current and future states of the business but also the “natural” and “operational” views (see section on business processes). Enterprise Architecture therefore greatly reduces the effort required in any BPR exercise as it provides two excellent starting points: an “operational” model of how the relevant portion of the business currently works, and a “natural” model which provides the required information on what the business must always do, without contamination by “how we do it today”. The architecture also provides the method and notation for representing the model of the desired future state, which then becomes part of the integrated overall model of the enterprise.

Furthermore if the architecture has been well designed in a ‘componentised’ form, reengineering becomes largely a matter of combining existing components in a different fashion; with the creation of new components being an exception. This dramatically speeds up the integration of a reengineered process.

IS World Net Navigation Map

IS World Net Home Page (net map or text only )

IS World Research and Scholarship

Enterprise Architecture

IT and Business Processes

Business Process Reengineering

Page Administration

This page is maintained by Dennis A Stevenson who can be reached at dstevens@aztec.co.za.

This page was last updated on July 15 1995. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided. Users are advised to look at our disclaimer .

Any feedback will be appreciated.