Week 2: Successful Reengineering Demands IS/Business Partnerships

This literature review is based on the content of Lecture 2 and the suggested reading of Lecture 2 of COMP 326. After reading those materials, I have learnt a lot of things.

Enterprise Re-engineering is unavoidable due to the competitive business environment. Reengineering is not the short term projects. Indeed, it aims to increase the strength of the enterprise relative to competitors in the long term. In order to survive in the markets, the cycle of reengineering becomes shorter and frequent to fulfill the market needs.  

In the business reengineering, the top management will have to decide the business goal, objectives, and directions of the changes, these processes consist of strategic thinking, strategic planning and opportunistic decision making. Nowadays revolutionary business change is always facilitated by leveraging the power of technology. So, along with the strategy management processes, Information System (IS) is an inseparable part in the effective business strategic management. As the article mentioned that the IS organization is a source of another key ingredient to business reengineers success.

We know IS strategy is crucial but how can it make the reengineering success. Top management will have to clearly deliver the message of the new business strategy to IS. IS can’t be an order taker anymore in nowadays model.        In the success model that IS has to understand the requirements of the business strategy correctly and then contributes creative and innovative ideas which are feasible to supports the business and align with corporate strategy. In addition, these ideas are also feasible to be delivered and supported by the IT.

Business reengineering is a large scale project. We know IS is crucial in the reengineering project but IS should not take the leadership of overall project. On the other hand, Business should not lead the overall project either. Business and IS should agreed to take the appropriate roles in different reengineering areas. There are three appropriate roles -Leadership; Partnership and Support. Both Business and IS will certainly involve in each area but act in different roles only.  If inappropriate roles are assigned, it will lead to fail because of underestimating the complexity of the process and implementation; taking longer time to reengineer; or using up some unnecessary resources. We have learnt that it is appropriate to assign both parities as partnership in some areas, such as business reengineering idea generation area, it is because Business is the right party who contributes the business ideas, and this idea will be moving toward implementation, so IS professional skill will be required.  IS and business has to balance in reengineering.

In conclusion, IS has been redefined itself in the new role that is no longer taking order from business and no longer incrementally fulfilling the business requirements. In preparing for the challenges of business reengineering, IS should be working closely to the business, knowing what is happening in the business trend, trying to interpret the what is being said the by the chairman, focusing on the future; contributing creative and innovative ideas and then preparing itself to be able to manage a large scale reengineering projects.