Redesigning Reengineering Through Measurement-Driven Inference
Authors: Nissen, Mark
Journal: MIS Quarterly (1990)
DOI: 10.2307/249553
This first decade of business process reengineering (BPR) is blemished by sporadic success, pathological performance, and inefficiency. Reengineering inefficiency is driven in part by cost and cycle time for process redesign, a process itself that requires deep reengineering knowledge and specialized expertise. However, such knowledge and expertise are not addressed by extant, first-generation redesign tools, so these intellectual activities must be performed manually at present, or provided through expensive BPR consulting services. Knowledge-based systems (KBS) address the requirements for knowledge and expertise directly, and they can augment firstgeneration tools to reduce redesign cost and cycle time, and hence increase reengineering efficiency. This study employs the methods and tools of reengineering recursively, to redesign the process of process redesign itself. Using measurement-driven inference, a second-generation KBS redesign tool called KOPeR is developed to automate three key intellectual activities required for process redesign—process measurement, pathology diagnosis, and transformation matching. This KBS tool is used in the laboratory to redesign a commercial pro…