Reengineering Revisited

Computerworld - At its height, business-process reengineering was one of the biggest business ideas ever. Business historians of the future will characterize the 1990s as the decade of reengineering. Described in more than 25 books, featured in articles in every major business publication, discussed at hundreds of conferences, reengineering penetrated every continent, with the possible exception of Antarctica.
Reengineering became a money machine for several of its constituents: the gurus who propounded the idea (at least a couple of them!), the consulting firms that offered reengineering services to their clients, and the software vendors who managed to convince firms that their wares were critical to successful reengineering. Unfortunately, the idea didn't enrich those who were most responsible for its birth and continued life within organizations: the faithful practitioners. These individuals played their customary heroic roles on the reengineering stage, but others got all the credit.
Reengineering Defined

Reengineering today means different things to different people. In the early writings on reengineering, however, there was substantial consensus that reengineering incorporated the following ideas:
• Radical redesign and improvement of work.
• Attacking broad, cross-functional business processes.
• "Stretch" goals of order-of-magnitude improvement.
• The use of IT as an enabler of new ways of working.
In the general business audience, however, other meanings proliferated. To some, reengineering came to mean any attempt to change how work is done -- even incremental change of very small processes. To others, it became a code word for downsizing. The latter meaning wasn't really fair, since none of the original literature on reengineering had stressed that objective. It was a somewhat cynical adoption of the word by senior executives (and their communications staffs) that brought this meaning into being.
We still remember the first time the reengineering-as-downsizing notion appeared in the press. In 1995, Pacific Bell announced that it was cutting 10,000 employees. Because of "reengineering," it didn't need them anymore, the press release said. We were conducting some research at Pac Bell at the time, and we knew that although the company was doing some reengineering, it certainly wasn't far enough along for anyone to know how many people (if any) would be freed up. Shortly thereafter, Apple Computer Inc. announced a similar reduction using the "R word." We were also familiar enough with that company to know that it wasn't true reengineering.
What happened to the term reengineering is typical of the proliferation of meanings that accompanies any successful new business idea. Consultants, middle and senior managers, and vendors had lots of incentives to jump