Beyond Business Process Reengineering

I'm preparing a lecture for my MBA students on information systems and the support of business processes. The purpose of this lecture is to illustrate how information systems have enabled the organization to move from siloed departmental information systems to integrated systems that support the entire business process across departments. This transformation really took hold in the 1990s and was associated with the act of business process re-engineering (BPR). This BPR effort served as a means to reconceptualize the firm from departments into processes and to recognized the value of having information stored in a single and centralized location.

I conducted a little research to support the material from the book in order to find the next step; to determine what happens when organizations no longer find ways to continue to increase efficiencies through BPR. In search of the next step I came across a Harvard Business Review article describing a potential next step for moving beyond BPR. One potential solution is the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. Using this approach, organizations reconceptulize the firm into a set of loosely coupled services that form the business processes. A service is a specific outcome that can be reused across the organization and, if implemented properly, can be reused by any part of the organization rather than replicated.

Rather than having a tightly integrated business process that is unique to the firm, organizations can now create more generic services that can be combined as building blocks to be used and reused as needed across the organization. These individual services can be developed internally or purchased externally. The reusability and the ease of decoupling the services and recombining them as the organizational needs change make this a much more flexible and efficient method compared to the inflexible architecture of the enterprise systems we constructed as a result of the BPR efforts.

I need to look into this further. I'm more familiar with BPR than with SOA as a means to increase organizational efficiency. This service-oriented method is intriguing but seems a little harder to grasp right now. I wonder if firms are able to quickly grasp and adopt this new method or if there are other methods emerging as the next step beyond BPR.