What have we unlearned since the early days of the process movement?

Abstract

The vision brought forth by Michael Hammer in the late 1980s was to save struggling American companies by getting them to focus on the creation of value for clients by reorganizing their operations and structure around the use of IT systems. This was the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) movement. It spawned most if not all the business process work since then, including BPMDS. The main principle behind BPR was to design the envisioned process around outcomes (value), not tasks. In this paper, we show that this principle was not heeded by the followers of BPR. This is plainly visible when you look into any example of a process model done with modern process modeling notations, such as BPMN. What one sees is mostly a set of interconnected tasks, with mostly an implicit outcome. It is about time we went back to the early principles of BPR and connected people by explicitly showing the collaboration between the actors of the process, the outcome of the process, and only then designing the activities and their sequence.