About the book
Ten years ago, Computer Sciences Corporation's James Champy co-authored the New York
Times best seller, Reengineering the Corporation, that set the world alight with 2,300,000
copies in print. But that was last decade. Ten years on, Computer Sciences Corporation's
Howard Smith, has co-authored the book that reinvents reengineering and sets the business
agenda for the decade ahead.
Don't bridge the business-IT divide: Obliterate it! This book provides the first
authoritative analysis of how Business Process Management (BPM) changes everything in
business and what it portends. While the vision of process management is not new, existing
reengineering theories and systems have not been able to cope with the reality of business
processes-until now. In this book, Smith and internationally acclaimed co-author, Peter
Fingar, herald a breakthrough in process thinking and technologies that utterly transforms
today's information systems and reduces the lag between management intent and execution.
How important is this to business? Here's a line from GE's current annual report: "(process)
Digitization represents a revolution that may be the greatest opportunity for growth that
our company has ever seen."
By placing business processes on center stage, corporations can gain the capabilities
they need to innovate, reenergize performance and deliver the value today's markets
demand. A process-managed enterprise makes agile course corrections, embeds six sigma
quality and reduces cumulative costs across the value chain. It pursues strategic
initiatives with confidence, including mergers, consolidation, alliances, acquisitions,
outsourcing and global expansion. Process management is the only way to achieve these
objectives with transparency, management control and accountability.
During the reengineering wave of the 1990s, management prophets' books full of stories
about other companies were all you had to guide the transformation of your business.
Although their underlying theories were based on age-old common sense and general systems
theory proposed fifty years earlier, they offered no path to execution. By contrast, the
process-managed enterprise grasps control of internal processes and communicates with a
universal process language that enables partners to execute on shared vision - to
understand each other's operations in detail, jointly design processes and manage the
entire lifecycle of their business improvement initiatives.
Process management is not another form of automation, a new killer-app or a fashionable
new management theory. Process management discovers what you do and then manages the
lifecycle of improvement and optimization, in a way that translates directly to operation.
Whether you wish to adopt industry best practices for efficiency or pursue competitive
differentiation, you will need process management. Based on a solid mathematical
foundation, the BPM breakthrough is for business people. Designed top down in accordance
with a company's strategy, business processes can now be unhindered by the constraints of
existing IT systems.
You will find this brave new world inside the pages of Business Process Management: The
Third Wave. Short on stories and long on insight and practical information, this book will
help you write your own story of success. The book provides the first authoritative
analysis of how BPM changes everything in business - and what it portends. Welcome to the
company of the future, the fully digitized corporation, the process-managed enterprise.
Welcome to the next fifty years of IT.
312 pages Hardcover