Web-driven management thinking: A look at business process redesign in the age of the web

Abstract

Traditionally, management thinking has preceded and quite possibly driven the adoption and use of information technologies (IT) in organizations. That is, management schools (of thought) that emphasize certain types of work structures usually appear earlier than IT geared at supporting those work structures. This situation has undoubtedly changed recently, arguably around the mid-1990s, with the explosion in the commercial use of the Internet and particularly the Web. A first step towards a new management framework to help organizations benefit from modern Web-based IT is proposed and discussed in this paper. Our goal is to provide some basic elements that can be used by managers and researchers as a starting point for a broader management model. As such, we focus on a particular set of activities associated with team coordination and communication in production and service delivery business processes. Our framework is based on our experiences in 30 business process redesign projects conducted in partnership with 15 US organizations from 1997 to 2000. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.