Davenport & Stoddard 1994 — Reengineering: Business Change of Mythic Proportions?

Issues & Opinions piece in MIS Quarterly (18:2, June 1994, pp. 121–127) by Thomas H. Davenport (Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation) and Donna B. Stoddard (Harvard Business School). Written at the peak of the BPR wave, the article 'demythologises' reengineering by separating its rhetoric from what the authors observed in fieldwork. The empirical base is interviews and conversations with more than 200 companies, supplemented by rigorous research on 35 reengineering initiatives reported in Jarvenpaa & Stoddard (1993, HBS working paper). Notably, Davenport himself co-authored one of the founding BPR statements (Process Innovation, 1993; Davenport & Short, 1990) and is therefore critiquing the movement from inside, not against it.

The seven myths

The myths are listed verbatim on p. 121–122 and then dispelled one by one (pp. 122–126).

1. The Myth of Reengineering's Novelty

Hammer & Champy's claim of newness (the Drucker blurb on the cover of [[sources/1993-hammer-champy-reengineering-the-corporation|Reengineering the Corporation]]) is rejected by decomposing reengineering into five primary components — clean-slate design, cross-functional process orientation, radical performance change, IT as enabler, and accompanying organisational/human change — and showing that each has antecedents (Taylor 1911 for work analysis; Porter 1985 and design-for-manufacturing for cross-functional process thinking; Juran 1964 and Deming for radical change; 1950s–60s systems analysis for IT-as-enabler; the Tavistock socio-technical school for organisational accompaniment). What is new is the synthesis, not the parts (p. 122).

2. The Myth of the Clean Slate

"Don't automate, obliterate" (Hammer 1990) is rhetorically powerful but operationally unaffordable: a blank sheet for design typically requires a blank check for implementation. Davenport & Stoddard cite a firm whose clean-slate order-management redesign would have cost an estimated US$1 billion over seven years, and an insurance company whose 'greenfield' implementation took 24 months and could not demonstrate financial viability. Their prescription: separate clean-slate design from clean-slate implementation, and design with a 'dirty slate' that treats existing enablers and constraints as inputs (p. 122–123).

3. The Myth of IS Leadership

IS organisations frequently initiate reengineering — typically out of dissatisfaction with systems-planning or data-modelling exercises that automated existing processes without changing them — but should not lead it. The successful pattern is a non-IS business sponsor with end-to-end process responsibility plus a non-IS champion working with a cross-functional team that includes IS. The authors note that IS most often acts as an inhibitor of reengineering, because of new-system lead times and the difficulty of modifying legacy systems (p. 123–124).

4. The Myth of Reengineering vs. Quality

Hammer & Champy frame incrementalism as actively pernicious ("creating a company with no valor or courage", quoted p. 124). Davenport & Stoddard reject the dichotomy: most studied firms maintain a portfolio of operational-change approaches (reengineering, continuous improvement, incremental change, restructuring), and the most effective ones combine tools — root-cause analysis from quality, process value analysis from focused-improvement work, IT enablement from reengineering — into a customised programme (p. 124).

5. The Myth of Top-Down Design

Davenport himself had previously argued that only those overlooking multiple functions could see cross-functional opportunities (Davenport 1993, p. 12, quoted on p. 125). Here he qualifies that view: high-level flow, sub-processes, performance objectives, and inputs/outputs are appropriately designed by a small team, but the detailed design of activities should be done by those who do the work. Post-reengineering execution teams ignore prescribed designs they had no hand in creating. The authors connect this to socio-technical 'minimum critical specifications', participative work redesign (Hackman & Oldham 1980), and continuous-improvement traditions (Imai 1986) (p. 125).

6. The Myth of Reengineering as Transformation

Hammer & Champy treat reengineering as synonymous with organisational transformation. Davenport & Stoddard separate the two: organisational transformation (Adams 1984) requires reframing of shared meaning and broad change in structure, strategy, and capability; reengineering at best transforms a few work processes at a time. They report knowing of no successful cases of the broad-brush approach in which firms reengineer all seven-or-more core processes simultaneously, and cite IBM's and Xerox's early experience of having to retreat to a small number of priority processes (p. 125–126).

7. The Myth of Reengineering's Permanence

Reengineering will follow the management-fad life cycle (Pascale 1990); the authors estimate that its US peak occurred in early 1994. They sketch three futures: (i) absorption into a new synthesis, (ii) absorption into existing change methods (strategic planning, IS development), or (iii) integration with quality and other process-oriented approaches into a unified process-management discipline. Option (iii) is their preferred outcome and effectively foreshadows the BPM lifecycle (p. 126).

Position in the BPR debate

This is the earliest substantive critique of BPR practice from inside the academic management community, published in a top-tier IS journal while the movement was still ascendant. Three features make it distinctive:

The seven myths map closely onto the enduring BPR failure modes catalogued in syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy: clean-slate over-reach, IT-leadership confusion, false dichotomy with continuous improvement, top-down design fallacy, conflation of process redesign with whole-organisation transformation, and the temporary-fad framing.

Cited from

syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy — listed there as a 1990s BPR-critic gap; this ingest closes that gap.

Cited by

sources/1993-davenport-process-innovation — frontmatter back-link: this 1994 critique is rooted in the more cautious posture of Davenport's 1993 book.

Connections

Concepts: concepts/bpm-lifecycle (foreshadowed by myth 7) · clean-slate vs dirty-slate design · participative work design · process portfolio (reengineering + continuous improvement + restructuring).

Related sources: sources/1990-hammer-reengineering-work · sources/1993-hammer-champy-reengineering-the-corporation · sources/1993-davenport-process-innovation.

Syntheses: syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy.