www.btinternet.com/~adrian.larner/review/spurr
Software Assistance for Business Re-Engineering
Kathy Spurr, Paul Layzell, Leslie Jennison, and Neil Richards (Eds)
John Wiley & Sons, 1993, 224pp, hardbound, £26.95
ISBN 0 471 94240 5
A Review by Adrian Larner for the Computer Journal
Also on this webpage (below) is my later review of Spurr et al. (Eds) Business Objects: Software Solutions
This book comprises the papers presented at the British Computer Society CASE specialist group seminar of 29th June 1993. Like all conference proceedings, it is a curate’s egg. Business (Process) (Re-)engineering – its practitioners cannot agree on its syntax, let alone its semantics – takes up the baton of corporate data base and enterprise analysis. Not that B(P)(R)E is confined to IT, of course: it encompasses the entire enterprise and subsumes total quality management. It is nothing, many of the contributors tell us, if not holistic (so there’s goodness for you).
Between three papers of introduction to the subject, and two that address how the approach can be made to work, come six on proprietary methods and tools. But the best introduction is probably the final paper, by Linda Hickman. The six central papers are much what we would expect: generally well written, with enough information to tempt and tease, but not enough to allow the reader any real understanding. They are, in a word, exercises in selling, some more blatant than others. One contributor lists seven selection criteria for process modelling tools and concludes: Few process modelling tools in present use match up to these demanding requirements. The remainder of this paper discusses one tool ... which scores highly under every one of the issues discussed above. Surprise surprise. The products range from mundane, but probably useful, tools for recording process analyses, to a process simulator that is object oriented (of course) and AI-based: just the sort of tool you would trust in a fundamental remodelling of your entire business.
Well, that got off lightly!
CASE and BPRE: I guess if you couldn’t jump on two bandwagons at once
you wouldn’t join the conference circus.
The first of the selling exercises, by Julian Watts, briefly mentions the option of piecemeal process engineering – which cautious souls might favour – and gives a good account of the analysis of value streams (value-adding sequences of processes). Chris Haynes’ introductory paper, the third and shortest, describes a somewhat different and rather promising value-based approach. But such nuggets are small, and few, and far between; the subject is new, its notions vague, and some of its verbiage makes one think that re-engineering has been applied to our mother tongue. Skip straight to Haynes’ paper to avoid: in the onrushing face of change ... Business Process Redesign as a concept is contained within the overall domain of change.... All this adds up to mean that the change is transformational ... New ways of working mean a change to the status quo ... rollout is the formal implementation and institutionalisation of the innovation within the organisational mainstream.