Management
Information and Program Evaluation Systems by Alan Walter Steiss
Management
Information and Program Evaluation Systems by Alan Walter Steiss
BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING
Organizations in both the public and private sectors must focus on satisfying their customers by effectively delivering the right products and services at both the highest level of quality and the lowest level of production costÑnot an easy task. Various techniques have been used in the past to adjust to changing performance requirements. In many cases, these change initiatives have created "push-pull" conflicts between cost, the quality of service provided, product innovations, and employee involvement. Today, it is no longer appropriate to compromise one objective for another. Unfortunately, the massive volume of articles, newsletters, books, and contractor information about Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Benchmarking, Total Quality Management (TQM), and so forth, have probably caused more confusion than enlightenment. Managers often do not know where to turn when they need help in managing change. They are either under-informed or over-informed. And ironically, they do not necessarily know into which category they fall.
Reenginering Defined
Hammer and Champy have defined reengineering as:
...the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed. [1]
Asking fundamental questions--What are we doing and why?--forces an examination of current practices and processes and an identification those which are obsolete, erroneous, and inappropriate. Radical redesign means getting to the root of things, not merely improving existing procedures and continuing to struggle with sub-optimization. It means disregarding existing structures and procedures and inventing new ways of accomplishing critical objectives. Hammer and Champy suggest that, in the broadest sense, reengineering is starting over, involving dramatic, holistic changes when an organization redesigns its business processes to achieve significant improvements in performance. The focus is on processes rather than people, structures, and tasks.
The National Academy of Public Administration further defines reengineering as:
...a radical improvement approach that critically examines, rethinks and redesigns mission product and service processes within a political environment. It achieves dramatic mission performance gains from multiple customer and stakeholder perspectives. It is a key part of a process management approach for optimal performance that continually evaluates, adjusts, or removes processes. [2]
According to Hammer and Champy, reengineered process should be designed to be simpler than those they replace. Often, a new hybrid of centralized and decentralized operations is created. Several functional operations might be combined and the number of checks and controls reduced. The result is that work is performed where it makes most sense, and workers can make more decisions for themselves.
Successful organizations are envisioned as applying information technology to develop networks that cross functional boundaries and integrate business processes rather than operating through functional hierarchies or organizational silos. Information technology has been developed and applied, in many cases, to achieve short-term improvement in existing and fragmented processes.
| Focus on customer-driven business results: | Eliminate barriers that inhibit decision-making and the flow of work. |
| Compress time: | Develop concurrent rather than sequential steps; utilize a standard methodology for consistency and efficiency; increase process velocity; and develop teams with customer focus. |
| Eliminate non-value added activities: | It has been estimated that 50% to 90% of the steps in any business process are non-value added, i.e., steps that customers would not feel good about paying for if they knew they were part of the process. |
| Define end-to-end solutions: | Take a holistic view--business processes should be examined across all functional and organizational boundaries (including customers, suppliers, and business partners). Respect the "20/80 rule"--If you just do 80% of the job, you will only get 20% of the planned benefits. |
| Align to meet customer expectations: | Determine what the customer wants and when he wants it. |
| Empower people/distribute work: | Align responsibility and accountability by giving employees the power to make decisions and incentives to utilize that authority. Drive decision-making into the organization so that those closest to the information are empowered to make the call. Provide the knowledge, tools, and authority needed to make decisions and executive process effectively and thereby, foster a feeling of ownership at all levels of the organization. |
| Set far reaching goals and measure improvements: | Goals should be both aggressive and realistic and should directly support the organizational strategy. Employees must be challenged to beat the goals. |
| Quality at the source: | Build in quality at the source by supply timely performance feedback. Encourage self-inspection and peer assessments. Have the right people (well-trained, motivated, and organized), applying the right tools and systems, in carrying out simplified processes, to produce products and services that have been designed for productivity, within the appropriate organizational infrastructure. |
| Implement continuous improvements: | Aggressively question all business practices on an on-going basis to continually exploit opportunities. |
| Identify and communicate interdependencies: | An organization is made up of a series of complex processes carried out by interdependent units. The linkages among these processes/units must be clearly understood by all participants. |
| Adopt cost-effective, leading edge technology: | State of the art technology should empower employees to make decisions, increase flexibility; compress development time; and expand the capacity for positive change/improvement. |
| Do things once correctly: | Enter data at the source that have been mutually agreed upon as appropriate for effective decision-making; store and maintain these data centrally, replicated as necessary; achieve one coherent view of administrative processes. |
However, as Guha, et al, has pointed out, this localized, incremental approach has created extremely complex processes that contribute relatively little to the overall effectiveness of organizations operating in today's competitive environment. [3]
Simply applying the latest technology to existing processes does not ensure a valid solution to the problems of complex organizations. A further step must be taken to question and rethink the activities that are fundamental for business processes, removing unnecessary activities, and replacing archaic, functional processes with cross-functional activities. BPR focuses on the redesign of work process to enhance productivity and competitiveness. In combination with the use of information technology as an enabler of change, BPR can lead to significant gains in productivity, efficiency, responsiveness, service, quality and innovation.
A Total Delivery System
Business processes are the lifeline of any organization. A process can be defined as "a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specified output. . . a specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs." [4] Processes are the end-to-end work activities required to provide products and services to customers, end-users, or client groups. To be highly effective, an organization must optimize its business processes in line with its mission and strategic priorities. For many organizations, achieving this optimization requires major changes in policies, procedures, organization structure, management philosophy, and use of technology.
The basic premise underlying the System of Profound Knowledge, espoused by W. Edwards Deming, is that management must really understand their business processes at the grass roots level in order to successfully manage the implementation of major improvements. [5] The first among Deming's 14 points for management is: "Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business and to provide jobs." [6]. Deming's approach builds upon an appreciation of an organization as a total system, an understanding that all people are different, recognition that performance is governed largely by the system within which an individual works, and knowledge about variation, including appreciation of a stable system and some understanding of common and special causes of variation.
Most managers are accustomed to functional units and activities which can virtually stand alone. A much different perspective is called for in business process reengineering. A vertical view of an organization is replaced by a horizontal view of many interlocking processes which cross the boundaries between subunits or functions and often organization boundaries as well. Together, all of the processes in an organization form a total delivery system for services and products. Real value-added comes from the integration of activities across processes.
The significance of reengineering comes from the intense focus on satisfying end-user/customer requirements and expectations. A well designed process focuses on "value-added" activities for the end-users or customers and frees employees from burdensome bureaucratic constraints. The focus is on delivering enhanced products and services to the internal and external customers of the organization
While perspectives vary, most experts assert that BPR will deliver major gains in performance. BPR is normally applied where there is a substantial gap between what customers and stakeholders expect and actual performance of the organization. Performance gains of 40, 50 or 60 percent are frequently mentioned. Reengineering--with its radical changes in areas such as workflows, customer service, rules and regulations, job content, job skills, decision-making, organizational structure, and information systems--is a proven method for bringing about these levels of improvement.
Some authors have argued that continuous improvement--many small changes by empowered teams--is preferrable to the more dramatic quantium changes that often are recommended through a enterprise-wide business process reengineering initiative. Both reengineering and continuous improvement:
o Focus on business processes;
o Emphasize customer satisfaction;
o Require senior-level commitment and change management for success;
o Use teams and teamwork;
o Work to decentralize decision-making to the most appropriate levels within the organization;
o Use performance improvement measures and problem-solving techniques;
o Bring about change in values and beliefs (when successful)
Continuous improvement programs tend to focus on incremental improvements in existing business practices by identifying specific root causes of inefficiency and waste through detailed analyses. CI programs often originate from the "bottom-up". Reengineering focuses on large, cross-functional processes and entire business systems. Reengineering can neither be initiated nor sustained from the bottom or middle of the organization, but must be driven from the very top by leadership who believes that nothing is more important and who is willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen.
It has been suggested that BPR and CI programs are analogous to what a driver and a putter are to a golfer--they are different yet complementary and both are needed to win. The bold initiatives emerging from a BPR should drive continuous improvements, which, in turn, should sustain the periodic enterprise-wide efforts to re-evaluate the basic processes that support the overall mission of the organization.
The BPR Body Of Knowledge--An Overview
Michael Hammer, generally credited with coining the term "reengineering" in a 1990 article in the Harvard Business Review, makes the point that traditional methods of improving business performance have not produced the desired results. For the most part, information technology has not been the solution either. In many case, such technology has only caused inefficient processes to be performed more quickly. Used properly, however, Hammer believes that information technology can be instrumental in redesigning the way we do business.
Changes in competition and demands of customers are the two main drivers for instituting new ideas and far-reaching organizational changes. For many years, an organization was considered secure if it was competitive in one of three areas:
o Cost/productivity
o Quality/service
o Responsiveness/flexibility
More recently, however, the necessity to be good in at least two of these area has been recognized and many organization are quickly arriving at the point where it will be essential to excel in all three of these areas simultaneously. To accomplish this, organizations are developing new processes to produce thr results that are important to their customers. They are looking for ways to become more flexible and responsive while providing high quality products/services for a relatively low cost.
When the environment was fairly stable, work was divided into simple, repetitive tasks to create efficiencies of scale. Layers of supervision and controls were required to link these simple tasks together, and as a consequence, the resulting processes became more and more complex. Now, ever-increasing demands for flexibility and responsiveness are driving organization to develop processes whereby people can perform complex, multi-disciplinary tasks with a minimum of "overhead." A complex command structure takes too much time, and therefore, these processes must be "governed" by general understanding and agreement on vision and procedures.
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| Activity-Based Costing: | A set of accounting methods used to identify and describe costs and required resources for activities within processes |
| "As Is" Process: | A description of the current flow of a process, including subprocesses and activities, showing how products and services are created |
| Benchmarking: | Performance comparison of organizational business processes against an internal or external standard of recognized leaders. Most often the comparison is made against a similar process in another organization considered "world class." |
| Business Process: | A collection of related, structured activities--a chain of events--that produces a specific service or product for a particular customer or customers |
| Clean Sheet: | A concept popularized by reengineering experts which contends reengineering should totall y abandon a current process and start from scratch in building and deploying a new process |
| Core or Key Process: | A customer-related, management, or support process considered vital to the organization's success and survival |
| Customer: | Groups or individuals who have a business relationship with the organization, including direct recipients of products and services, internal customers who produce services and products for final recipients, and other organizations and entities which interact with an organization to produce products and services |
| Cycle Time: | The time that elapses from the beginning to the end of a process or subprocess and inputs are converted into outputs |
| Decomposition: | Breaking down a process into subprocesses and activities |
| Executive Team or Steering Committee: | Top management team responsible for developing and sustaining the process management approach in the organization, including selecting and evaluating reengineering projects |
| Function: | A set of related activities that are part of a process; often known as a subprocess within a process |
| "Heroic" Goal: | A goal that requires a significant change in the performance (quality, quantity, time, cost) of a process. Also called stretch goals, the targets are normally 50 percent or more. |
| Modeling or Flowcharting: | A graphic representation of the activities and subprocesses within a process and their inter- relationships |
| Performance Gap: | The gap between what customers and stakeholders expect and what each process and related subprocesses produces in terms of quality, quantity, time, and cost of services and products |
| Process Improvement Approach: | Approaches such as incremental business process improvement, business process redesign, and reengineering which can be used together or separately to improve processes and subprocesses |
| Process Owner: | An individual held accountable and responsible for the workings and improvement of one of the organization's defined processes and its related subprocesses |
| Stakeholders: | Individuals or groups who influence programs, products, and services, such as legislative bodies and public interest groups |
| Subprocess: | A collection of activities and tasks within each process |
| Timebox: | A set, specified period of time during which specific tasks must be performed |
| "To Be" Process: | A description of the desired flow of a process, including subprocesses and activities, showing how products and services could be created under a new vision |
| Value-Added: | Those activities or steps which add to or change a product or service as it goes through a process; these are the activities or steps that customers view as important and necessary |
| World Class Organization: | Organizations who are recognized as best for at least one critical process and are held as models for other organizations |
Adopted from: National Academy of Public Administration Foundation, Reengineering for Results, Washington, D.C., 1994.
Reengineering requires that the organization recognize its problems and seeks to dramatically overhaul the way it does business. According to Hammer, this is not something that can be accomplished in gradual steps (as espoused through the concepts of Total Quality Management). Rather, a "go-for-broke" approach that entails setting aside any preconceived notions of how the organization views its structure and ways of doing business. Hammer asserts that a new age is dawning as to how we organize ourselves to do business, and, in fact, do business.
Reengineering requires the organization to consider the final product of its efforts. While information technology can be very useful in these efforts, it cannot serve as the "tail wagging the dog"--it has to be the other way around. Management must lead the way, with technology servicing as an invaluable assistant.
In a follow-up book, Reengineering the Corporation (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), Hammer and James Champy clearly identify the root cause of what is wrong with the way many American companies do business. They then proceed to outline, in very concise and clear language, the steps organizations should take to reengineer their business processes.
Hammer and Champy suggest that many companies still adhere to the nearly two-hundred-year-old Adam Smith concept of work structure. In their opinion, these principles no longer apply in the dynamic, global-driven age in which companies have to compete as we near the 21st century. Many organizations lack the necessary focus on business process (the logical way products and services are produced, or the way we actually do work) and, perhaps more importantly, they fail to give adequate attention and concern for those who pay the bills--the customer.
Hammer and Champy have developed proven concepts and techniques that can be employed to turn organizations around. As opposed to the concept and goal of obtaining incremental improvements through the Total Quality Management movement, the concept of reengineering seeks to provide significant improvements by orders of magnitude.
As evidenced throughout the book, the key to reengineering lies in the need to have a willingness to start afresh--that is, with no preconceived notions as to the best way to organize to do business, to the methods employed, to the technology used in producing goods or services. It is a clean slate approach to problem solving. The approach also emphasizes the customer and the competition. The organization must be willing to set aside its old ways of doing things in the interest of making improvements. If that willingness is not there, the authors strongly advise against attempting the reengineering effort.
It is not surprising that Reengineering the Corporation spent many months on the nonfiction bestseller list of the New York Times. Since its release, the concepts of reengineering presented in the book have been put to the test by numerous companies--from manufacturing concerns to governmental and nonprofit entities. Many organizations have documented significant increases in productivity, profits, customer satisfaction, and employee morale as a result.
On the downside, many reengineering efforts (by some estimates 50% or more), just as Total Quality Management efforts, do not succeed, or at best yield only marginal improvements. This lack of success could be due to any number of reasons, ranging from lack of top management commitment to targeting the wrong processes or business areas to reengineer. While reengineering may not be the ultimate answer to every organization's problems, a prudent executive would be wise to at least take a very hard look at its prospects.
Following Hammer, numerous books have been published on effecting dramatic and radical changes in an organization. The following books are now considered "classics".
Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), by Thomas Davenport, is one of the most timely and well-written books on the subject of process or business reengineering. This book is written in non-technical language, wastes few words, and covers the entire spectrum of topics that are essential to a successful reengineering effort. Davenport places a significant emphasis on the role that information or computer technology can play in the reengineering effort, particularly how this technology can facilitate the overall effort.
Like other works on reengineering, Davenport makes the point that marginal improvements in operating performance will simply not work to ensure long-term survival in today's global economy and atmosphere of intense competition. A whole new view of how organizations do business must be explored, and that exploration must probe the very depths of the organization. If carefully planned and executed, such efforts can produce dramatic results.
An underlying principle of reengineering is that an organization must be examined from top to bottom and across all major functions. The aim of this examination should be to identify ways to significantly alter the way business is conducted to make it more efficient, profitable, and able to provide better customer service. Davenport carefully leads the reader through the requirements of a reengineering effort by describing in great detail the tools and techniques to be used in analyzing what a company is about and how it goes about carrying out its business.
Davenport also goes to great length to explore and explain how the reengineering effort impacts virtually every aspect of the organization -- everything from the structure of the organization to the roles and responsibilities of top management and the typical worker. The reader is clearly left with the impression that once the reengineering effort is successfully completed, the organization will have a new look, including new procedures, a new organizational structure and, perhaps most importantly, a new view of the way it does business.
H. James Harrington, in Business Process Improvement: The Breakthrough Strategy for Total Quality, Productivity, and Competitiveness (New York: McGraw Hill; 1991), suggests that currently, management spends too much time correcting problems that should not have occurred in the first place, if business processes were correct. Emphasis should now be placed on preventing problems--on developing business and manufacturing processes that work error-free. Harrington provides numerous lists of essential information that should be used in evaluating business processes and improving them. Business Process Improvement (BPI) can be achieved by applying new concepts that have proven effectiveness.
The major objectives of BPI are to make processes effective to achieve desired results; to make processes efficient to minimize resources; and to make processes adaptable to meet both customer and business changing needs. Improvements can take many forms. Barriers must be removed which interrupt the flow of work and processes must be streamline to reduce waste.
| Understand Reengineering | Build a Business and Political Case |
| o Understand business process fundamentals | o Have necessary and sufficient business (mission delivery) reasons for reengineering |
| o Know what reengineering is | o Have the organizational commitment and capacity to initiate and sustain reengineering |
| o Differentiate and integrate process improvement approaches | o Secure and sustain political support for reengineering |
| Adopt a Process Management Approach | Measure and Track Performance Continuously |
| o Understand the organizational mandate and set mission strategic directions and goals cascading to process specific goals and decision-making across and down the organization | o Create organizational understanding of the value of measurement and how it will be used |
| o Define, model, and prioritize business processes important for mission performance | o Tie performance management to customer and stakeholder current and future expectations |
| o Practice "hands on" senior management ownership of process improvement through personal responsibility, involvement, and decision-making | |
| o Adjust organizational structures to better support process management initiatives | |
| o Create an assessment program to evaluate process management | |
| Manage Reengineering Project for Results | Practice Change Management and Provide Central Support |
| o Have clear criteria to select what should be reengineered | o Develop human resources management strategies to support reengineering |
| o Place the project at the right level with a defined reengineering team purpose and goals | o Build information resources management strategies and a technology framework to support process change |
| o Use a well-trained, diversified, expert team and facilitate it working well | o Create a central support group to assist and integrate reengineering efforts and other improvement efforts across the organization |
| o Follow a structured, disciplined approach for reengineering | o Create an overarching and project-specific internal and external communication and education program |
Adopted from: Sharon L. Caudle, Reengineering for Results: Keys to Success from Government Experience (Washington,.D.C: National Academy of Public Administration, 1995).
Harrington advocates the formation of an Executive Improvement Team (EIT) which should be charged with the development of a model using a five-phase approach: (1) organizing for improvement; (2) understanding the process; (3) streamlining; (4) measurement and control; and (5) continuous improvement. The EIT identifies the critical business processes.
A Process Improvement Team (PIT), consisting of from 4 to 12 members representing all of the department involved in the process, is then established. The activities of the PIT include: (a) flowcharting the process; (b) gathering process cost and quality information; (c) establishing measurement points and feedback loops; (d) qualifying the process; (e) developing and implementing improvement plans; (f) reporting efficiency, effectiveness, and change status; and (g) ensuring process adaptability.
Business Process Improvement is a continuous cycle. As the business environment continues to change, new methods, programs, and equipment need to be evaluated. Customers' expectations change which require businesses to continually evaluate their products and services. People within organizations develop knowledge and capabilities that can be used for process improvements. Unattended processes degrade over time. There are better ways to do things, and organizations must find ways to improve.
BPR in the Public Sector
The message that comes across most clearly with respect to the entire concept of reengineering is that organizations must continually inquire as to why they do what they do. Many public organizations have become so inbred to the manner in which work is performed that it is hard to see any other way. Sharon Caudle notes that for decades, public officials have followed "the dogmas of the quiet past" in doing government's work. [7] Legal mandates or internal tradition built a morass of processes which did little to serve the customer of government products and services. Government managers, seemingly trapped in a labyrinth of outmoded ways of doing business, simply asked for more money and people to keep operations afloat. Little, if any, incentive existed to rethink how government conducted its business. The result was an escalation of expenditures for services delivered at minimal and often declining performance levels.
Today, resources are no longer infinite and government performance no longer can be a hit or miss proposition. Government must operate with dwindling resources and must contend with a public that is increasingly frustrated with its efforts. Public organizations that have eliminated outmoded operational practices create stunning pictures of how government can truly work well. If reengineering of basic government processes does not occur, those who rely on government products and services remain as frustrated victims of poor government performance.
Government managers and staff have key reengineering roles to fill. First, they will be running their own reengineering projects -- planning, staffing, funding, designing, deploying, and monitoring results. They will have to integrate those efforts with other process improvement efforts. Second, managers and staff will be involved in process improvement strategic planning and making decisions on what projects to take on and how to allocate resources. Third, they will be called on to facilitate other groups' reengineering projects. Here, managers and staff may serve as actual staff or provide special expertise for project teams. They may serve on steering committees or advisory groups guiding those projects. They may also be called on to devote in-kind resources such as equipment or access to facilities. They might also be asked to serve as independent auditors of projects.
Functional Process Improvement (FPI)
Functional Process Improvement is a variation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) which has been developed and applied by the Department of Defense. The Department's reengineering program includes the following key objectives:
o Standardization of like processes across DoD to effect economies of scale and reflect best business practices
o Direct linkage of process performance to strategic plans, monitored through the use of metrics and measures
o Cross-functional integration of major business processes to streamline process performance and reduce waste and duplication of effort
o Application of standard methodologies, techniques, and tools for process improvement
o Introduction of an entrepreneurial culture which promotes employee initiative and responsible risk-taking in support of internal and external customer needs
o Functional management responsibility for insuring the development and deployment of information management systems for redesigned functional processes.
As noted in a recent DOD Report:
Process improvement is itself a process and is subject to the same requirements for continuous improvement as are all functional processes in the Department. Benchmarking is an integral component of improvement efforts. In fact, competition for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award mandates the use of continuous benchmarking to set performance targets and to uncover best business practices. [8]
The Functional Process Improvement cycle is broken down into six different actions: Define, Analyze, Evaluate, Plan, Approve, and Execute. FPI is not singular in nature, but must be reiterated in order for its true value to be developed. After one round of changes is under way, the search for more improvements begins again.
Define: The cycle begins by defining the baselines, objectives, and strategies for the particular function under analysis. Baselines describe the current status of the function in terms of processes, costs, performance measures, and other attributes. Knowing where the function is now is a necessary prerequisite to determining where it should go, which is specified, in turn, in the objectives identified for the function. Strategies describe, in general terms, how the function will get from its baseline to its objectives. Baselines, objectives, and strategies are also known collectively as functional direction.
Analyze: With the FPI framework developed, the work of analyzing current processes to identify potential improvement opportunities begins A structured approach is provided for documenting current processes and for understanding how improvements to those processes might be achieved. Ideas for improvement opportunities can come from a variety of sources, including an assessment of current obstacles to meeting the objectives of the function, surveys of best business practices, analyses of data sources and information flows, and the process of building activity and cost models.
Evaluate: The primary activity in the third FPI step is the Functional Economic Analysis (FEA). In this evaluation., improvement opportunities--which describe what should be changed--are converted into initiatives by considering how the improvement opportunities should be implemented. Initiatives are then packaged into alternatives, each of which describes a possible plan for moving the function to its objectives. With the alternatives defined, the Functional Economic Analysis proceeds with an evaluation of the alternatives by constructing financial and non financial measures of merit to help the functional manager determine the best course to follow.
Plan, Approve, and Execute: With a promising alternative selected, the more detailed planning required to implement the alternative is performed. Then, approval of the proposed changes is obtained, and the changes are executed.
Functional Economic Analysis plays two important roles within the FPI program. As a process, FEA interprets the data needed by functional managers to choose the best alternative--the Evaluate step. The primary focus of this process is the comparison of baseline and alternative costs using economic analysis techniques. As a document, the FEA is an essential part of the Approve step. It presents the case for investments in process changes by collecting information relevant to the decision and displaying that information in standard formats. The FEA document should include more than just the results of the cost analysis. It should also summarize the strategic plans for the functional area and activity, report on performance measures and targets, describe the functional improvement program, and outline the supporting data management and information systems changes required by the improvement program. The FEA document should be designed to "carry" all the information needed to make good business decisions.
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| Functional Focus: | Evaluating changes to functional processes, not information systems. Designed to provide the manager with the bottom-line understanding needed to use all types of resources effectively in meeting objectives. Necessary to assure that client/server environments are selected because of the benefits they will deliver to the functions of the organization, not solely because of technological considerations. |
| Measurement: | Measurement of key attributes of functional processes, such as costs and outputs. Quantitative measures are important in assessing the current state of the function, in setting substantive objectives, in evaluating alternative ways to achieve those objectives, and in gauging progress toward the objectives. |
| Management Tool: | Designed to be an ongoing management tool, not a one-time reporting requirement. Supports the functional manager in responding more quickly and consistently in the analyses required for the existing acquisition and programming/budgeting processes. Shows both the costs and benefits of planned investments. Shows projected costs for the function by fiscal year. Provides the management information, such as performance measures, needed to monitor progress toward process improvement objectives within the functional plan. |
Endnotes
[1] Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (New York: HarperCollins, 1993)
[2] National Academy of Public Administration Foundation, Reengineering for Results, (Washington, D.C., 1994).
[3] S. Guha. W.J. Kettinger, and T.C. Teng, "Business Process Reengineering: Building a Comprehensive Methodology, Information Systems Management (Summer, 1993).
[4] Thomas Davenport, Process Innovation (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), p. 5
[5] W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, second edition (Potomac, MD: W. Edwards Deming Institute, 1994), chapter 4.
[6] W. Edwards Deming, Out of Crisis (Potomac, MD: W. Edwards Deming Institute, 1986), chapter 2.
[7] Sharon L. Caudle, Reengineering for Results: Keys to Success from Government Experience (Washington,.D.C: National Academy of Public Administration, 1995). Should be read in its entirety for every serious student of change; if time does not permit a full reading, at least the Foreword by James Champy, and the initial two chapters are recommended.
[8] Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, A Benchmarking Report on Functional Process Improvement ,(November,1993)