Donna B. Stoddard

Business reengineering at CIGNA Corporation: experiences and lessons learned from the first five years

Considerable uncertainty and confusion exists about what business reengineering is and when it succeeds. This paper provides a longitudinal view of CIGNA Corporations experiences in business reengineering since 1989. CIGNA is a leading provider of insurance and related financial services throughout the United States and the world. Between 1989 and 1993, CIGNA completed over 20 reengineering initiatives, saving more than

Business process redesign: Radical and evolutionary change

100 million. Each

The Reality of Business Reengineering: Pacific Bell's Centrex Provisioning Process:

1 invested in reengineering has ultimately brought

Interorganizational business process redesign: merging technological and process innovation

2-3 in returned benefits. This article describes projects with major payoffs: operating expenses reduced by 42%, cycle times improved by 100%, customer satisfaction up by 50%, quality improvements of 75%. It also highlights how CIGNAs reengineering started small and how learning was used to escalate from this quick hit to reengineering larger and more complex parts of the organization. CIGNAs reengineering successes have also required a willingness to allow failure and learn from failures. Only about 50% of the reengineering efforts bring the type of benefits expected initially. Repeated trials are often necessary. CIGNAs lessons can help other firms anticipate what they will experience as they ascend the learning curve of business reengineering.

Introduction to the Minitrack: Computer-Mediated Inter-Organizational Systems

Abstract We explore the nature of change when firms engage in business process redesign (i.e., reengineering). According to the proponents, business process redesign is an all-or-nothing affair. Numerous books and articles on the topic promulgate the notion that reengineering is nothing short of a revolution. But the rhetoric can be daunting—and may mislead managers planning to reengineer their organizations. Our field research on 15 business process redesign projects suggests that only one of the two phases of reengineering effort needs to be revolutionary for the project to reach field implementation. Reengineering involves both the design—the blueprint for change—and the implementation of those plans. Reengineering design phase must have elements of radical change. The radicalness instills motivation in ways that more evolutionary projects cannot. But as companies implement the plans, they can—and many do—use a more evolutionary change process, and still gain effective results. Our results provide support to the emerging body of literature that argues that organizations combine evolutionary and radical change harmoniously.

Reengineering: business change of mythic proportions?

Business process reengineering (BPR), a recently popularized management change strategy, promises radical improvements in the business processes of an organization. This article describes and analyzes one of Pacific Bells successful reengineering initiatives, the Centrex reengineering project. It suggests that successful reengineering implementation does not necessarily meet the popular assumptions underlying BPR. Reengineering designs tend to be radical and assume change to be clean slate, processbased, top-down directed, and information technology enabled. By contrast, reengineering implementation tends to involve improvements that are incremental, rather than radical. The key to implementation appears to be a continual involvement of front-line employees and managers.

Business process redesign: tactics for managing radical change

Interorganizational business process reengineering is a logical extension of discussions in the 1980s of the potential for interorganizational systems to fundamentally redefine relationships between buyers and sellers and even competitors within an industry context. The paper presents a framework or model describing the relationship between technological and process innovations, and describes the interdependence of these two forces in the context of interorganizational business process redesign. This framework can be used to examine unique characteristics of reengineering within a single organization and across multiple organizations. This model is used to explain the inconsistency in the literature regarding the benefits of EDI and other interorganizational systems, which are described as providing strategic competitive advantage in some articles, and as providing little or no benefits for implementing firms in other articles. The framework describes the importance of merging technological and process innovations in order to achieve the potential to transform both organizations and interorganizational processes and relationships.

Business process reengineering: tactics for managing radical change

We invite papers for this minitrack that address the organizational and technological factors related to IOS successful implementation and diffusion, including: (1) technological, organizational, or market structure explanations for success and/or failure of IOS; (2) the role of business process redesign (BPR) in facilitating IOS or creating value through IOS; (3) case studies of companies or markets that demonstrate mutual economic benefits from the innovation; (4) the potential for IOS to transform and create new markets (e.g. virtual or hyperspace markets); and (5) the role of the information superhighway and Internet in facilitating development of IOS capabilities.Both traditional research papers and case study examples of IOS implementations are welcome, but any case study papers presented should also be presented within the context of an academic framework that is solidly grounded in the literature that has already been published in this field.