The legacy of reengineering: what remains relevant 30 years on

In the early 1990s an influential current took shape in management thought — business process reengineering (BPR). It touched millions of jobs worldwide, led to the restructuring of thousands of companies and largely defined the shape of corporate management for the decade. Thirty years on, we can assess which of that legacy stood the test of practice.

What was done right

The current’s main merit is that it drew the corporate world’s attention to processes as an object of management in their own right. Before this, management thought mostly in terms of functions and departments. Reengineering showed that real value is created in cross-functional flows — processes that cross departmental boundaries.

Today this idea seems obvious, but in the early 1990s it was revolutionary. The concept of process management that underlies the whole modern BPM discipline owes much of its existence to this current.

What was revised

A number of the early reengineering’s central theses did not stand the test of practice.

The “clean slate”

The thesis that processes should be designed “from scratch”, ignoring existing experience, proved mistaken in many implementations. The real organizational expertise accumulated in existing processes is valuable. Discarding it entirely leads to a loss of knowledge and to serious risks when launching a new process.

The radicalism of change

The thesis that improvements should be radical (a multiplefold rise in indicators, not a gradual one) led many companies to unjustified risk. Practice showed that evolutionary improvements more often lead to a durable result than revolutionary ones. The approach of continuous small improvement, on average, delivers better long-term results.

Technological determinism

The early current saw IT as the main driver of process change. It was believed that integrated systems would automatically lead to a new structure of work. Reality proved more complex: technology is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Without cultural and organizational change, new systems often simply automated old inefficient processes.

What reengineering did not foresee

Among the modern trends there are several that substantially change the picture:

• Process mining. The ability to discover processes automatically from data radically changes the approach to diagnosis, which used to be built on interviews.
• Adaptive processes. The concept of case management, which acknowledges the limits of a rigid process approach, contradicts the rigor of the early reengineering.
• The service and digital economy. The early current thought mostly in industrial terms; digital processes require a different toolkit.

What remained relevant

For all the criticism, a number of principles still hold:

• The process is the fundamental unit of analysis in business
• Cross-functional optimization matters more than local optimization
• Information technology can radically change the nature of work
• Change requires strong leadership support

These principles underpin the BPM discipline today. The paradox of reengineering’s legacy is that the current itself drew attention to processes — an undeniable merit — but its specific prescriptions (radicalism, the clean slate, a technological revolution) were substantially corrected by later practice. Modern mature approaches developed in debate with the early reengineering rather than as its direct continuation.