---
title: "Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology"
type: source
tags: [bpr, reengineering, davenport, foundational, book, alternative-framing]
authors: [Davenport, Thomas H.]
year: 1993
venue: "Harvard Business School Press"
kind: book
raw_path: ""
isbn: "978-0-87584-366-7"
status: referenced-not-ingested
sources: []
key_claims:
  - "Contemporaneous alternative framing to Hammer's 'obliterate' posture — Davenport positions IT as the enabler of process change, with more caution about cultural/organisational prerequisites."
  - "Foregrounds process innovation as planned, IT-enabled change requiring alignment of strategy, structure, people and process — less radical-redesign rhetoric than Hammer & Champy."
  - "Introduces 'process vision' and 'process-oriented enabling technologies' — frameworks that outlive the BPR era proper."
  - "Davenport's subsequent critique (Davenport & Stoddard 1994) of BPR-hype is rooted in this more cautious posture."
created: 2026-04-22
updated: 2026-04-22
---

# Davenport 1993 — Process Innovation

**Stub — referenced-not-ingested.** The *other* foundational BPR text of 1993, often overshadowed in popular memory by Hammer & Champy but intellectually more careful. Davenport's cautions in this book foreshadow the cross-era continuity themes in [[syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy]].

## Why ingest

- Provides a **contrast to Hammer's radical-redesign rhetoric** within the BPR era itself — a critical counter-balance for RQ2.1/2.2.
- Davenport's framing (IT as enabler, not solution) anticipates the modern BPM lifecycle's integration of redesign with enabling technology.
- Essential for understanding that "BPR" was never monolithic — there were two major schools (Hammer radical vs. Davenport IT-enabled).

## Cited from

- [[syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy]] — Phase 1 reconstruction.
- Implicitly via [[sources/1994-davenport-stoddard-reengineering-mythic-proportions]] — Davenport's later critique builds on this book's foundation.

## How to obtain

ISBN 978-0-87584-366-7. Harvard Business School Press, 1993. University library or second-hand — less widely reprinted than Hammer & Champy.

## Upgrade when available

Meta-ingest with chapter index. Particularly valuable chapters: process vision, enabling technologies, organisational/cultural prerequisites for process innovation.