Best practices in e‐business process management : Extending a re‐engineering framework

In formulating e‐business strategies enabled by the Internet and WWW, parallels can be drawn from the viewpoint on process enabled by desktop and centralized computing in the 1990s, and that of present day. In this paper, the cornerstone of 1990s thinking on process, Hammer and Champy's nine best practices, are analyzed to apply for e‐business process management (e‐process management). For instance, Hammer and Champy's first principle is re‐stated as “[o]rganize around business rules (some combined tasks can be performed by stakeholders using interfaces accessed via the WWW)”. One finding is that checks and controls may not need to be reduced – as Hammer and Champy espouse – if they are perceived as valuable and can be performed inexpensively using Internet technologies. This work evolves the traditional re‐engineering framework to use in current e‐business realities; it can be applied to formulate e‐business strategies that are rooted in more traditional, and vetted, management thinking.