The Contribution of Learning Organization Principles to Large-scale Business Process Re-Engineering.

In recent years the failure of BPR initiatives to produce and sustain desired benefits has raised a range of challenging questions on its effectiveness. An issue at the heart of the debate is that of BPR's mechanistic nature. Ultimately such an approach is too simplistic to deal effectively with the complex organizational change issues instigated by BPR. This paper critically reviews BPR and evaluates the potential contribution from learning organization principles. There is an increased focus on people and learning issues to move beyond the limited mechanistic focus. A critical review of the existing literature is established which recognizes the co-existence (but not the integration) of both subjective and objective paradigms in BPR and change management programmes. Research conducted on a large-scale BPR organizational application is used to examine the issues that develop in practice and distills key learning. From this longitudinal case study emerged critical success factors (CSFs) for BPR implementation which provided the basis of a conceptual model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]