BPR encourages the formation of multi-disciplinary teams of people that concentrate on fulfilling a business process. These 'process teams' extend across traditional organizational boundaries. BPR failures occur when conflicts and integration problems arise when attempting to link together disparate applications that functionally support a common business process. For example, a residential loan origination business process team might have to log on to one system to perform data entry, log on to a second system to perform a credit analysis, and log on yet to a third system to obtain rate information, and so on. This clearly unsatisfactory, time consuming and costly behavior is a consequence of the functional organization's preoccupation with creating 'closed-model' function based systems. These types of systems are difficult to integrate, interface, and reuse; qualities which are pre-requisites for successful BPR-enabling systems.
Reengineered business processes are not static. They are always evolving, changing, and undergoing refinements. Information systems that support and enable business processes must also be flexible, and capable of rapid change. In addition, the organizational units that are responsible for managing and operating business processes must likewise be able to absorb change and still function at the highest levels. Closed-model systems cannot sustain the magnitude of change that will be directed at them by the competitive environment. BPR efforts require tight coordination across organizational units in order to manage and control reengineered business processes. Problems will arise if the organizational unit that is the target of reengineering has other overriding priorities and agendas.
The class-based organization is highly suited to optimize BPR. Class-teams are organizationally positioned to optimize communication. There are also few organizational constraints that would restrict cooperation between units. Because class-teams participate in open-model systems, requirements to build new class operations can be fulfilled more rapidly than is possible with closed-model systems. There are, in fact, class-teams that specialize in the development of business process class components. Modifying a BPR-enabled open-model system is a relatively rapid process. In a class-based environment, there are also fewer political and system constraints that would act as inhibitors of the BPR-enabled system.
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