NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has been the central theme of organisational thinking since Michael Hammer and James Champy introduced the concept in the early 1990s. Hammer and Champy saw IT as central to the BPR effort. At the time, they didn't know about e-business and how it would demand the complete re-engineering of IT itself.

Business processes have increasingly adopted a critical technological dimension, but e-business processes are different. With e-business, technology starts out at the centre of the stage. In the past, a business's people were often rightly accused of not taking technology seriously enough. With e-business, the danger is that dependence on technology will obscure the need to support people at every level of the enterprise.

Survey evidence suggests that the introduction of IT without a parallel change in business structures and work patterns may diminish productivity. IT plus organisational change has the opposite effect. Successful e-business, whether of the business to consumer (B2C) or business to business (B2B) variety, depends on the intelligent application of powerful technologies, and this means re-building the enterprise in order to realise and exploit competitive opportunities.

The most effective enterprises will be the ones in which individuals and workgroups make the most effective use of the critical technologies of the new information and communications based economy. This must be achieved at every level of the enterprise, through the application of the appropriate technology and the adoption of management techniques designed to monitor performance, co-ordinate activities, and integrate structures. On top of this, both the technologies and the management must be scalable, responsive and change-friendly. These are no easy things, but the promise of increased effectiveness can only be achieved if the right decisions are made at the outset.