Revisiting BPR : A New Framework & Model for Future

Business Process Reengineering is all about fundamental reconsideration and rethinking of different processes associated with a business & redesigning these processes to obtain dramatic, drastic and sustainable change and improvement in quality and service with reduction in cost. The concept of BPR was advocated by Michael Hammer in 1990 and since then BPR has become an important area for conceptual and empirical research. Over the years with the rapid growth in information and communication technology (ICT), the application of ICT in BPR has taken the centre stage of contemporary BPR research. Researchers developed numerous models for analyzing, interpreting and implementing BPR and among those models the Object Oriented Models (OOM) and the Knowledge Based Models (KBM) rely heavily on the applications of ICT in BPR and that is why these two models are the most interesting and important from the researchers' point of view. Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a framework to integrate business processes and supporting IT infrastructures into secure, standardized components services that can be reused and combined to address changing business activities and priorities. Dynamic program analysis is the analysis of computer software which is performed by executing programs built from that software system to predict the behaviour of the system as well as to fine tune performance. This paper proposes a mixed model of BPR by combining the OOM and KBM and calls it the Object Oriented Knowledge Based Model or OKB Model. The OKB model first identifies business processes at the top or strategic level, middle or supervisory level and bottom or operational level and then breaks down these processes into repetitive activities. Next, the OKB model converts these repetitive activities into services as per the SOA framework. Once an enterprise wide SOA implementation blueprint is ready, dynamic program instrumentation techniques are used to fine tune, optimize and reverse engineer the existing legacy systems across the organization. The OKB model is unique in the sense that it uses the concept of SOA and dynamic program instrumentation, i.e.; it combines the principles of organizational reengineering with the tools of ICT and thus builds an effective, easy to understand and easy to implement framework for business process reengineering