BPR: alive and well in the public sector

This paper examines three business process re‐engineering (BPR) projects, one conducted in the private sector and two conducted in the UK's higher education sector. The broad aim of the paper is to compare public and private sector applications of BPR. The paper begins with a brief overview of BPR and identifies three unresolved issues from the literature (the choice of modelling techniques used to describe business processes, whether to use generic or context specific process maps and whether to aim for radical or incremental change). An overview of each project is given and the paper considers how each of the unresolved theoretical issues was addressed in the cases before making a public vs private sector comparison. The paper illustrates differences and similarities between private sector usage of BPR and the two public sector examples given here and concludes that the techniques of BPR are highly applicable in the public sector.