The widespread practice of reengineering long-established business processes from scratch, usually with the aid of information technology, has probably wrecked more lives than any business fashion since the reign of the numbers-oriented financial whiz-kids of the '50s. Even reengineering's best-known prophets will remind you that most reengineering projects fail. One problem is that these prophets have offered little concrete guidance for would-be reengineers. Daniel Petrozzo and John Stepper's Successful Reengineering promises to change this by providing step-by-step instructions.
Most people will find this book useful only as a cultural artifact from the strange world of industrial automation. It presumes that you're up-to-date on the jargon and debates of that world, and it makes no pretense of drawing the stuff together in a coherent conceptual framework.
What the authors do provide is a batch of small details that nobody could make up without having been there, such as the danger of conflict among partisans of various software-development tools. They also insist that every reengineering team needs a public relations manager to spread the gospel and quell dissent.
Yet beneath this, Petrozzo and Stepper's book shows that the whole idea of reengineering is not a new one. Core ideas for mapping and redesigning work processes are essentially what systems analysts started doing decades ago: treating organizations as assembly lines, people as component parts of a machine, and themselves as the minds behind the One Best Way to arrange work organizations. Their methods presume that we live in a Wired world where everyone has a computer and access to the Net, but they exhibit no concept of the power of putting people online.
The world presented by Petrozzo and Stepper has little room for change, little use for empowerment, and little respect for the capacity of intelligent people to organize their work for themselves. We can do better than that, and we can do it without the mayhem that reengineering so routinely brings to people's lives.
Successful Reengineering, by Daniel P. Petrozzo and John C. Stepper: US$24.95 hardcover. Van Nostrand Reinhold: (800) 842 3636, +1 (606) 525 6600.
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