노동당 정부의 패배와 업무 시스템 재설계(BPR) 그리고 사람

[소금쟁이]

코딱지 만한 구멍가게 하나 운영하면서 별 전문용어를 다 꺼집어 내어 봅니다.

글쎄요. 한때는 이 업무 프로세스 설계과정이기도 하고 기업의 효율적 의사결정 프로세스라는

특명을 맡아서 기안을 해 보기도 했었습니다. 기업의 업무 프로세스를 재정립하는 것은

사실 신속한 의사결정을 통한 업무의 효율성과 생산성 제고에 중요한 작업이기는 합니다만

불이익에 당하는 조직 구성원의 반발과 의사결정 방식의 변화 자체에 대한 저항 또한

엄청난 것으로 기업의 최고 권력자의 지원 없이는 성공하기 어려운 시스템 변화전략입니다.

그러나,  변화하는 시장조건, 기업 시스템의 구태와 비효율성이 기업의 채산성은 물론이고

생존을 위협해야 하는 경우에는 업무 시스템의 재설계 없이는 기업의 생존 혹은 성장은 불가능

하게 됩니다. 바로 이럴때 회사 경영자는 업무 프로세스라는 조직 운영 시스템의 재설계라는

혁명적 조취를 취하게 됩니다.

이 BPR을 국가. 사회 시스템 영역으로 그 개념을 적용할때는 정부조직의 리엔지니어링의 문제에

도달하게 됩니다. 흔히 우리는 시스템의 작동이나 사회 시스템적 기능을 언급 합니다. 국가 운영

시스템의 예도 이에 해당합니다. 기업의 운영 시스템이 작동하기 위해서는 업무 프로세스 과정 즉

시스템 운영에 참석한 관련자들의 업무 수행능력과 전문성, 책임성 없이는 결코 시스템이 원했던 효율성은

기대할 수가 없습니다. 더더구나 한국의 대부분의 기업활동처럼 오너 1인의 의사결정 구조를 갖고

있는 기업조직은 사실 엄청난 시스템 붕괴와 파멸이라는 위험성을 갖고 있는 것입니다. 바로 비민주주적

그리고 비 합리적 의사결정 구조라는 기업문화입니다.

마찬가지로 국가 운영 시스템이 안정될 수 있는 것도 민주적이고 합리적인 국가 운영체제를 유지하고 있느냐가

중요한 관건이 될 것입니다. 국가 운영자인 정부에 대한 불신이 존재하고 국가 운영 시스템에 참여한

정치인, 국가 공무원 조직에 대한 믿음이 부재한 경우에 있어서는 시스템은 늘 왜곡되게 운영되고 작동

될 것입니다. 이럴 경우 국가가 위급한 상황에 닥쳤을 경우 그나마 형식적으로 존재하여 불안정한 국가운영체제도 쉽게

혼란에 빠져들게 될 것입니다. 중요한 것은 시스템 설계 그리고 시스템 혁신, 시스템 리엔지니어링등이

결코 기업이나 국가 또한 그 조직이 가진 문제를 해결할 수 없다는 것입니다. 시스템 관련 사람들의 질 즉 인간의 질적 상태가

시스템적 운영의 성공여부가 결정된다는 것입니다. 

기업에는 업무 전문성에 기초하여 전체 업무의 흐름을 이해하고 자신의 책임성을 갖춘 윤리적인 구성원들의

참여가 시스템 운영의 성공에 아주 중요한 것처럼 국가운영 시스템에서도 또한 국가운영체제의 참여자들의

높은 전문성과 윤리성이 아주 중요한 관건일 것이라 봅니다. 다른말로 기업의 가장 중요한 자산은 무엇일까요 ?

아님 한 국가의 가장 중요한 자산의 무엇일까요 ? 뭐 첨단과학 기술, 석유, 석탄 등의 지하자원 -- 아닙지요.

기업의 가장 중요한 자산은 회사의 질 높은 종업원이고 국가의 가장 중요한 자산은 국민이라는 사람들의 질적수준인 것입니다.

별 볼일없는 시스템이라도 갖추고 있다면 --- 사람, 사람 그리고 또 사람이 가장 중요한 자산입지요.

호주 NSW 주선거에서 노동당 주 정부가 예상된 것처럼 말 그대로 개박살 났습니다. 닉 그레이너 이후로 처음이니까 12년도

더 된 것 같습니다만 오랜만에 갖는 정권교체에 어떤 변화가 있을지 많이 기대 되네요. 노동당 정부의 구태하고 진부한

정치시스템이 무너지는 것을 바라다보면서도 왜 대혁신을 할 수가 없었을까요. 바로 BPR을 수행할때 부닥치게 되는

문제 때문에 그 일을 수행할 적임자가 없었던 것입니다. 권력의 구심적이 약했졌기때문에 아무런 혁신을 할 수가 없었던

것입니다. 노동당의 패배와 몰락의 근본적 원인에 바로 BPR의 개념이 적용될 수가 있을 것입죠.

개인도 기업도 사회도 국가도 그 생존조건이 급격하게 변화하는 세상에 존재하고 있습니다. BPR을 개인이라는 삶의

생활구조에 적용하더라도 생산적이고 효율적인 삶을 이끌어가는 유용한 방법이 됩니다. 아래에 BPR을 활용하는 구체적인

예를 한번 옮겨 보았습니다. 저도 하도 오래전에 활용했던 개념이라 기억이 가물가물 합니다만 내부의 경영혁신을

BPR 개념과 연계하여 리엔지니어링정도는 아니지만 변화를 주고 있습지요. 그래서 저에게 과도하게 의존되어 있는

업무처리 방식을 decentralizing 분산하여 일의 강도를 완화하려 하고 있습니다. 지 힘든 속내 누가 알아 주기나 하나요.

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Business process reengineering

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This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. It needs additional references or sources for verification. Tagged since June 2010. It may require general cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Tagged since June 2010.

Business Process Reengineering Cycle.

Business Process Reengineering is the analysis and design of workflows and processes within an organization. A business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Re-engineering is the basis for many recent developments in management. The cross-functional team, for example, has become popular because of the desire to re-engineer separate functional tasks into complete cross-functional processes.^{[citation needed]} Also, many recent management information systems developments aim to integrate a wide number of business functions. Enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, knowledge management systems, groupware and collaborative systems, Human Resource Management Systems and customer relationship management.

Business Process Reengineering is also known as Business Process Redesign, Business Transformation, or Business Process Change Management.

Contents

[hide]

• 1 Overview
• 2 History
  • 2.1 Development after 1995
• 3 Business process reengineering topics
  • 3.1 Definition
  • 3.2 The role of information technology
  • 3.3 Research & Methodology
• 4 Critique
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 Further reading
• 8 External links

[edit] Overview

Business process reengineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. A key stimulus for reengineering has been the continuing development and deployment of sophisticated information systems and networks. Leading organizations are becoming bolder in using this technology to support innovative business processes, rather than refining current ways of doing work.^[1]

Reengineering guidance and relationship of Mission and Work Processes to Information Technology.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is basically the fundamental rethinking and radical re-design, made to an organizations existing resources. It is more than just business improvising.

It is an approach for redesigning the way work is done to better support the organization's mission and reduce costs. Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission, strategic goals, and customer needs. Basic questions are asked, such as "Does our mission need to be redefined? Are our strategic goals aligned with our mission? Who are our customers?" An organization may find that it is operating on questionable assumptions, particularly in terms of the wants and needs of its customers. Only after the organization rethinks what it should be doing, does it go on to decide how best to do it.^[1]

Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, reengineering focuses on the organization's business processes—the steps and procedures that govern how resources are used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular customers or markets. As a structured ordering of work steps across time and place, a business process can be decomposed into specific activities, measured, modeled, and improved. It can also be completely redesigned or eliminated altogether. Reengineering identifies, analyzes, and redesigns an organization's core business processes with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.^[1]

Reengineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented into subprocesses and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall performance of the entire process. Reengineering maintains that optimizing the performance of subprocesses can result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that reason, reengineering focuses on redesigning the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers. This drive for realizing dramatic improvements by fundamentally rethinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes reengineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement.^[1]

[edit] History

In 1990, Michael Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which he claimed that the major challenge for managers is to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for automating it.^[2] This statement implicitly accused managers of having focused on the wrong issues, namely that technology in general, and more specifically information technology, has been used primarily for automating existing processes rather than using it as an enabler for making non-value adding work obsolete.

Hammer's claim was simple: Most of the work being done does not add any value for customers, and this work should be removed, not accelerated through automation. Instead, companies should reconsider their processes in order to maximize customer value, while minimizing the consumption of resources required for delivering their product or service. A similar idea was advocated by Thomas H. Davenport and J. Short in 1990^[3], at that time a member of the Ernst & Young research center, in a paper published in the Sloan Management Review

This idea, to unbiasedly review a company’s business processes, was rapidly adopted by a huge number of firms, which were striving for renewed competitiveness, which they had lost due to the market entrance of foreign competitors, their inability to satisfy customer needs, and their insufficient cost structure^{[citation needed]}. Even well established management thinkers, such as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, were accepting and advocating BPR as a new tool for (re-)achieving success in a dynamic world^{[citation needed]}. During the following years, a fast growing number of publications, books as well as journal articles, were dedicated to BPR, and many consulting firms embarked on this trend and developed BPR methods. However, the critics were fast to claim that BPR was a way to dehumanize the work place, increase managerial control, and to justify downsizing, i.e. major reductions of the work force ^[4], and a rebirth of Taylorism under a different label.

Despite this critique, reengineering was adopted at an accelerating pace and by 1993, as many as 65% of the Fortune 500 companies claimed to either have initiated reengineering efforts, or to have plans to do so^{[citation needed]}. This trend was fueled by the fast adoption of BPR by the consulting industry, but also by the study Made in America^{[citation needed]}, conducted by MIT, that showed how companies in many US industries had lagged behind their foreign counterparts in terms of competitiveness, time-to-market and productivity.

[edit] Development after 1995

With the publication of critiques in 1995 and 1996 by some of the early BPR proponents^{[citation needed]}, coupled with abuses and misuses of the concept by others, the reengineering fervor in the U.S. began to wane. Since then, considering business processes as a starting point for business analysis and redesign has become a widely accepted approach and is a standard part of the change methodology portfolio, but is typically performed in a less radical way as originally proposed.

More recently, the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) has gained major attention in the corporate world and can be considered as a successor to the BPR wave of the 1990s, as it is evenly driven by a striving for process efficiency supported by information technology. Equivalently to the critique brought forward against BPR, BPM is now accused^{[citation needed]} of focusing on technology and disregarding the people aspects of change.

[edit] Business process reengineering topics

[edit] Definition

Different definitions can be found. This section contains the definition provided in notable publications in the field:

• "... 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."^[5]
• "encompasses the envisioning of new work strategies, the actual process design activity, and the implementation of the change in all its complex technological, human, and organizational dimensions."^[6]

Additionally, Davenport (ibid.) points out the major difference between BPR and other approaches to organization development (OD), especially the continuous improvement or TQM movement, when he states: "Today firms must seek not fractional, but multiplicative levels of improvement – 10x rather than 10%." Finally, Johansson^[7] provide a description of BPR relative to other process-oriented views, such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Just-in-time (JIT), and state:

• "Business Process Reengineering, although a close relative, seeks radical rather than merely continuous improvement. It escalates the efforts of JIT and TQM to make process orientation a strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business processes, and uses the specific techniques within the JIT and TQM ”toolboxes” as enablers, while broadening the process vision."

In order to achieve the major improvements BPR is seeking for, the change of structural organizational variables, and other ways of managing and performing work is often considered as being insufficient. For being able to reap the achievable benefits fully, the use of information technology (IT) is conceived as a major contributing factor. While IT traditionally has been used for supporting the existing business functions, i.e. it was used for increasing organizational efficiency, it now plays a role as enabler of new organizational forms, and patterns of collaboration within and between organizations^{[citation needed]}.

BPR derives its existence from different disciplines, and four major areas can be identified as being subjected to change in BPR - organization, technology, strategy, and people - where a process view is used as common framework for considering these dimensions. The approach can be graphically depicted by a modification of "Leavitt’s diamond".^[8]

Business strategy is the primary driver of BPR initiatives and the other dimensions are governed by strategy's encompassing role. The organization dimension reflects the structural elements of the company, such as hierarchical levels, the composition of organizational units, and the distribution of work between them^{[citation needed]}. Technology is concerned with the use of computer systems and other forms of communication technology in the business. In BPR, information technology is generally considered as playing a role as enabler of new forms of organizing and collaborating, rather than supporting existing business functions. The people / human resources dimension deals with aspects such as education, training, motivation and reward systems. The concept of business processes - interrelated activities aiming at creating a value added output to a customer - is the basic underlying idea of BPR. These processes are characterized by a number of attributes: Process ownership, customer focus, value adding, and cross-functionality.

[edit] The role of information technology

Information technology (IT) has historically played an important role in the reengineering concept^{[citation needed]}. It is considered by some as a major enabler for new forms of working and collaborating within an organization and across organizational borders^{[citation needed]}.

Early BPR literature ^[9] identified several so called disruptive technologies that were supposed to challenge traditional wisdom about how work should be performed.

• Shared databases, making information available at many places
• Expert systems, allowing generalists to perform specialist tasks
• Telecommunication networks, allowing organizations to be centralized and decentralized at the same time
• Decision-support tools, allowing decision-making to be a part of everybody's job
• Wireless data communication and portable computers, allowing field personnel to work office independent
• Interactive videodisk, to get in immediate contact with potential buyers
• Automatic identification and tracking, allowing things to tell where they are, instead of requiring to be found
• High performance computing, allowing on-the-fly planning and revisioning

In the mid 1990s, especially workflow management systems were considered as a significant contributor to improved process efficiency. Also ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendors, such as SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, positioned their solutions as vehicles for business process redesign and improvement.

[edit] Research & Methodology

Although the labels and steps differ slightly, the early methodologies that were rooted in IT-centric BPR solutions share many of the same basic principles and elements. The following outline is one such model, based on the PRLC (Process Reengineering Life Cycle) approach developed by Guha.^[10].

Simplified schematic outline of using a business process approach, examplified for pharmceutical R&D:
1. Structural organization with functional units
2. Introduction of New Product Development as cross-functional process
3. Re-structuring and streamlining activities, removal of non-value adding tasks

Benefiting from lessons learned from the early adopters, some BPR practitioners advocated a change in emphasis to a customer-centric, as opposed to an IT-centric, methodology. One such methodology, that also incorporated a Risk and Impact Assessment to account for the impact that BPR can have on jobs and operations, was described by Lon Roberts (1994)^{[citation needed]}. Roberts also stressed the use of change management tools to proactively address resistance to change—a factor linked to the demise of many reengineering initiatives that looked good on the drawing board.

Some items to use on a process analysis checklist are: Reduce handoffs, Centralize data, Reduce delays, Free resources faster, Combine similar activities. Also within the management consulting industry, a significant number of methodological approaches have been developed.^[11]

[edit] Critique

Reengineering has earned a bad reputation because such projects have often resulted in massive layoffs^{[citation needed]}. This reputation is not altogether unwarranted, since companies have often downsized under the banner of reengineering. Further, reengineering has not always lived up to its expectations. The main reasons seem to be that:

• Reengineering assumes that the factor that limits an organization's performance is the ineffectiveness of its processes (which may or may not be true) and offers no means of validating that assumption.
• Reengineering assumes the need to start the process of performance improvement with a "clean slate," i.e. totally disregard the status quo.
• According to Eliyahu M. Goldratt (and his Theory of Constraints) reengineering does not provide an effective way to focus improvement efforts on the organization's constraint^{[citation needed]}.

There was considerable hype surrounding the introduction of Reengineering the Corporation (partially due to the fact that the authors of the book reportedly^{[citation needed]} bought numbers of copies to promote it to the top of bestseller lists).

Abrahamson (1996) showed that fashionable management terms tend to follow a lifecycle, which for Reengineering peaked between 1993 and 1996 (Ponzi and Koenig 2002). They argue that Reengineering was in fact nothing new (as e.g. when Henry Ford implemented the assembly line in 1908, he was in fact reengineering, radically changing the way of thinking in an organization). Dubois (2002) highlights the value of signaling terms as Reengineering, giving it a name, and stimulating it. At the same there can be a danger in usage of such fashionable concepts as mere ammunition to implement particular reform. Read Article by Faraz Rafique. The most frequent and harsh critique against BPR concerns the strict focus on efficiency and technology and the disregard of people in the organization that is subjected to a reengineering initiative. Very often, the label BPR was used for major workforce reductions. Thomas Davenport, an early BPR proponent, stated that:

"When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal. And consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy, the two names most closely associated with reengineering, have insisted all along that layoffs shouldn't be the point. But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly." ^[12]

Michael Hammer similarly admitted that:

"I wasn't smart enough about that. I was reflecting my engineering background and was insufficient appreciative of the human dimension. I've learned that's critical." ^[13]

Other criticism brought forward against the BPR concept include

• It never changed management thinking, actually the largest causes of failure in an organization
• lack of management support for the initiative and thus poor acceptance in the organization.
• exaggerated expectations regarding the potential benefits from a BPR initiative and consequently failure to achieve the expected results.
• underestimation of the resistance to change within the organization.
• implementation of generic so-called best-practice processes that do not fit specific company needs.
• overtrust in technology solutions.
• performing BPR as a one-off project with limited strategy alignment and long-term perspective.
• poor project management.