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BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING achieves performance breakthroughs by concurrently leveraging three factors: technology, information, and human potential. Programs leveraging only one or two of these factors have more modest outcomes.
The success of a business process reengineering program depends on its focus (does it address processes, not functions?), its scope (does it follow processes across the organization, or confine itself within narrow functional organizations?), its depth (does it include social as well as technical redesign?), and its breadth (does it encompass the most important processes in the business?).
Over the last three years, as many as 70 percent of all reengineering projects have failed because they lacked clarity, sponsorship, or resources. In projects lacking clarity, the relationships among project goals, process goals and overall business goals are unstated or ambiguous. In successful projects, all participants are clear about the purpose and about how the processes contribute to achieving overall business goals.
In projects lacking sponsorship, the reengineering "champion" fails to enlist the executives with responsibility for the areas affected by reengineering. Often, this is because the reengineering project is seen as a threat, or as a replacement for an ongoing improvement program. In successful projects, however, reengineering is seen as an "umbrella" approach and is embraced by all executives because it is endorsed at the highest levels.
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