BPI-BPM-BPR overview

An important part of effective business design is Business Process Improvement (BPI), as part of a foundation laying approach for longer term Business Process Management (BPM).

Business Process Improvement (BPI) is a systematic approach to help an organisation make significant changes in the way it does business.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, with methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.

Both approaches have their roots and origins in Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a management approach aiming at improvements by elevating efficiency and effectiveness of processes within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a "clean slate" perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business.

Some primer articles for further reading:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Improvement
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Management
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering

What isn't it?

Business Process Re-engineering efforts of the 90's earnt a reputation as downsizing exercises, which was a gross oversimplification of what is involved with BPR- the following quote from Thomas Davenport sums it up nicely:

"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." (Davenport, 1995)

Within many agency contexts, BPI is being used as an opportunity to review processes that involve a level of technology enabling the business, to ensure that we are using technology at key points of value to meet the points laid out in the Why do it? section, meet current business demands, and prepare for future business changes.

NEXT: Why Do It?

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."   Albert Einstein