Abstract
Perhaps reengineering would have been better off if it had been called something else. From the beginning, some exponents of radical change in business processes called for their reengineering.1 Others, including one of us, advocated other, only slightly different names, but they never took off.2 The term “reengineering” seemed to appeal to a wide audience; managers hoped that they could improve how work was done in a manner similar to an engineer improving a circuit diagram, product design, or manufacturing assembly line. Of course, this desire was not new to reengineering; it dated at least to Frederick Taylor, whom some view as the founder of industrial engineering.
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1
The most prominent user of the reengineering term has been Michael Hammer. It was first widely employed by Hammer (1990) and then by Hammer and Champy (1993).
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2
One of us (Davenport), in writing with Jim Short (1990) about what has now become reengineering, used the term “business process redesign.” I converted to “process innovation” in Davenport (1993).
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Davenport, T.H., Perez-Guardado, M.A. (1999). Process Ecology: A New Metaphor for Reengineering-Oriented Change. In: Elzinga, D.J., Gulledge, T.R., Lee, CY. (eds) Business Process Engineering. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5091-4_2
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