Business Process Redesign (BPR) – Davenport & Short (1990)

In 1990, Thomas H. Davenport and James E. Short published “The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign” in the Sloan Management Review, introducing a framework that fundamentally reoriented how organizations think about leveraging information technology. Rather than treating IT as a tool for automating existing processes, Davenport and Short proposed that IT enables the radical redesign of core business processes—a shift they framed as a new form of industrial engineering appropriate for the information age.

The Business Process Redesign (BPR) model emerged at a moment when competitive pressures were intensifying and IT capabilities were expanding beyond simple automation. The authors observed that organizations routinely applied technology to existing process structures rather than questioning those structures themselves. By synthesizing concepts from industrial engineering, value chain analysis, and organizational theory, Davenport and Short provided practitioners with a conceptual and practical framework for achieving step-change improvements in cost, quality, speed, and customer service through process-level redesign.

Why Was the Model Created?

Davenport and Short developed the Business Process Redesign model in response to fundamental changes occurring in competitive environments and technology capabilities during the late 1980s. Organizations faced mounting pressures from several directions that made traditional approaches insufficient.

Competitive Pressure and Performance Challenges:Organizations operated in increasingly competitive environments where rivals had restructured their operations to achieve superior performance. Traditional industrial engineering had been applied relatively narrowly to manufacturing, yet competitive advantage increasingly derived from comprehensive business process performance—how effectively organizations managed customer acquisition, product design, order fulfillment, and customer service in addition to manufacturing efficiency.

Information Technology Capability Expansion:IT had evolved from supporting existing processes to enabling fundamentally different ways of working. Prior IT adoption had primarily focused on automating existing processes—faster, cheaper operations doing the same work. Davenport and Short recognized that emerging IT capabilities could support more radical redesign: information systems could capture customer data comprehensively, enable communication across organizational boundaries, support sophisticated decision-making, and automate complex processes previously requiring significant human judgment.

Limitations of Incremental Approaches: The authors observed that traditional process improvement had inherent limits. Optimizing an existing process sometimes locked organizations into suboptimal configurations. If a fundamental business process was poorly designed, making it more efficient merely made inefficiency faster. Competitive advantage increasingly came from reconceiving and fundamentally redesigning core business processes, not from incremental optimization.

Integration Opportunity: The model emerged from recognizing that IT could serve as a bridge for integrating processes previously separated or poorly coordinated. Complex products required coordination across functions (marketing, engineering, manufacturing); customer service required integration across departments. Information technology could connect these previously disconnected activities.

The model synthesized several recognitions: IT capabilities had expanded far beyond simple automation; process structure fundamentally determines organizational performance; organizational functions were fragmented in ways that created inefficiencies; and managers needed frameworks to guide how to leverage IT for business process redesign.

Core Concepts and Definitions

At the heart of the BPR model is a focus on business processes— end-to-end sets of activities that together deliver value to customers or the organization. Davenport and Short distinguish between core business processes (customer acquisition, product design, order fulfillment, customer service) and supporting processes (human resources, accounting). Core processes directly impact competitive positioning and should receive priority for redesign efforts.

The framework identifies five types of IT-enabled process redesign, each representing a distinct way technology can transform how work is performed:

• Automational: Eliminating human labor from a process. Routine, rule-based decisions are delegated to information systems, reducing cost and improving speed.
• Informational: Capturing process information for purposes of understanding. Comprehensive data availability enables better decisions and performance monitoring.
• Sequential: Changing process sequence or enabling parallelism. Activities previously performed in sequence can occur simultaneously when information flows electronically.
• Tracking: Monitoring process status and objects closely. Real-time visibility into process state enables proactive management and rapid response to exceptions.
• Analytical: Improving analysis of information and decision-making. Decision support tools and analytical models enable higher-quality decisions based on comprehensive data.
• Geographical: Coordinating processes across distances. IT enables work previously requiring physical proximity to be conducted by geographically distributed teams.
• Integrative: Coordination between tasks and processes. Information systems enable seamless handoffs and coordination across organizational boundaries.
• Intellectual: Capturing and distributing intellectual assets. Knowledge management capabilities enable organizational learning and expertise sharing.
• Disintermediating: Eliminating intermediaries from a process. Direct connections between process participants remove unnecessary steps and improve responsiveness.

The authors also articulate a systematic five-step methodology for process redesign: (1) develop the business vision and process objectives; (2) identify the processes to be redesigned; (3) understand and measure the existing process; (4) identify IT levers available; and (5) design and build a prototype of the new process.

Internal Validity

Davenport and Short’s BPR model was developed and validated through multiple approaches grounded in real organizational experience.

Case Study Research and Field Experience: The model was grounded in extensive case study research and consulting engagement across multiple industries. The authors documented actual business process redesign initiatives, examining organizations that successfully leveraged IT for process transformation, the business processes that could be fundamentally redesigned, the outcomes achieved, and the challenges encountered.

The paper provides detailed illustrative examples across diverse industries:

• Insurance Claims Processing: Companies previously handled claims through labor-intensive sequential processes. Information systems enabled redesign that significantly reduced processing time by allowing representatives with comprehensive system support to handle entire claims rather than sequential hand-offs.
• Airline Reservation Systems: Airlines completely restructured customer reservation processes through technology, enabling travel agents and eventually customers to access real-time information and conduct transactions independently.
• Telecommunications Service Installation: Companies redesigned installation processes so technicians could access complete customer information and design specifications in real-time, reducing site visits and improving coordination.
• Manufacturing Order Fulfillment: Firms redesigned order-to-delivery processes by enabling front-line personnel to access inventory, engineering, and manufacturing capability data to respond to customer orders immediately rather than through lengthy internal consultations.

The consistency of redesign patterns across telecommunications, insurance, airlines, and manufacturing supports the conclusion that the underlying redesign principles hold generally rather than being industry-specific.

External Validity

The BPR model’s external validity was established through several mechanisms that demonstrate generalizability beyond the original case contexts.

Multi-Industry Case Illustrations:The model was tested across diverse industries—insurance, airlines, telecommunications, and manufacturing—suggesting that business process redesign principles apply broadly. Fundamentally similar redesign patterns emerging across different industries lends credibility to the model’s generalizability.

Cross-Functional Process Coverage: The case examples span diverse functional areas and process types: customer-facing processes (reservations, claims handling, order fulfillment), internal operational processes (manufacturing scheduling, service delivery), and information-intensive processes (claims assessment, system design). This breadth suggests that process redesign principles apply to diverse process types rather than a narrow range.

Organizational Size Variation: The cases encompassed large organizations (major airlines, large telecommunications companies) as well as mid-sized firms. The applicability across different organizational sizes suggests the model is not limited to particular company profiles.

IT Technology Span:The case examples involved different IT technologies—telecommunications systems, database systems, personal computers with information access capabilities—demonstrating that redesign principles apply across technology platforms rather than being dependent on specific systems.

Theoretical Grounding:By grounding the model in established industrial engineering principles and extending them to IT-enabled contexts, the authors draw on a well-established theoretical tradition. The framework’s acknowledgment of contingencies—particular process characteristics, organizational capability, IT infrastructure, and market conditions—adds nuance without undermining the general applicability of the core principles.

Key Contributions

The Davenport & Short BPR model made several contributions that distinguished it from prior frameworks:

• Process-Centric View of Organizations: Rather than viewing organizations primarily through functional hierarchies, the model reframed them as collections of business processes. This shift in perspective opened new avenues for identifying improvement opportunities that cut across organizational silos.
• IT as Enabler, Not Automator: The framework explicitly distinguished between automating existing processes (paving cow paths) and using IT to enable fundamentally different process designs. This distinction was novel and influential.
• Systematic Redesign Methodology: The five-step methodology provided practitioners with actionable guidance for conducting process redesign projects, bridging academic concepts and managerial practice.
• Typology of IT-Enabled Change: The taxonomy of nine IT redesign roles provided a structured vocabulary for describing how technology transforms work, enabling more precise analysis of redesign opportunities.
• Industrial Engineering Heritage: By framing BPR as a natural evolution of industrial engineering, Davenport and Short legitimized the approach within established business disciplines while extending it to the information age.

Relevance to Technology Adoption

The Davenport & Short BPR framework carries direct and enduring relevance for understanding organizational technology adoption. It fundamentally reframes what it means to “adopt” technology: successful adoption is not simply purchasing and deploying a system, but rethinking how work should be performed and then designing technology-enabled processes to realize that vision.

The model’s emphasis on beginning with business objectives rather than technology capabilities is particularly instructive. Organizations that start by asking “what does our IT system support?” will likely automate existing inefficiencies. Organizations that start by asking “what should this process accomplish for customers and the organization?” and then determine technology requirements are positioned to achieve genuine transformation.

The framework also highlights that technology adoption barriers often reside in organizational and process structure rather than technology itself. A new system implemented within a fragmented, sequential process may deliver minimal value. The same technology implemented to enable an integrated, parallel process can deliver dramatic improvements. This insight directs attention to organizational redesign as a prerequisite for technology value realization.

The BPR model’s emphasis on change management—establishing transition infrastructure, communicating honestly, and preparing people for new ways of working—anticipates findings from subsequent technology adoption research showing that human and organizational factors consistently explain more variance in adoption outcomes than technical factors.

Note: This article provides an overview based on the comprehensive literature review. Readers are encouraged to consult the original publication for complete details.