Director, Accenture Institute for Strategic Change; Visiting Professor, Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College; Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Babson College
We trace in pragmatic terms some of what we know about knowledge, information technology, knowledge management practice and research, and provide two complementary frameworks that highlight potential opportunities for building a research agenda in this area. The papers in this special issue are then discussed.
Assistant Professor Marilyn Moore reread the rejection letter from a top tier MIS journal and then added it to the folder containing the letter she had received from another top MIS journal. Moore had graduated from Barker University one year before (June 1996) with a Ph.D. in business administration, majoring in management information systems and decision sciences. She had returned for her Ph.D. in 1992 at the age of 30, driven by her love of teaching and a desire to solve the problems she had seen in the eight years she had worked at a Fortune 100 consumer products firm. While at the firm, Moore had risen from a programmer to a senior systems analyst and had spent three years working with the firm's corporate training unit. With her tenure clock ticking, Moore returned to the firm she had worked for prior to entering the Ph.D. program. The firm again expressed interest in having her conduct research on IT-enabled organizational change. She sought help from senior faculty in her area to help her design the research project; her doctoral program had not addressed how to design complex, qualitative case-based research. Once again she was discouraged from pursuing this line of 'messy field research.' Although none of the faculty had conducted field-based case research, they were well aware of the problems with designing a study that adequately operationalized and controlled the variables and relationships of interest. They also pointed out that she might run into the same criticisms of the lack of generalizability of her findings since she was only planning to study one firm. In addition, they knew that field research took time and were concerned that Moore would not have a sufficient number of refereed publications to pass both school of business and university tenure hurdles.
This study addresses the issue of how leading firms manage information about their business processes. The researchers interviewed twenty firms, many of which were Baldrige quality award winners, and conducted a detailed case study of one firm particularly advanced in process management. The paper suggests that a key aspect of success in process improvement is effective management of information about process performance, even independent of information technology. The concept of double-loop learning is applied to process information. A process model of how to manage process information is advanced, with many examples from interviews of leading practices. Challenges in moving toward increased use of process information are also described.
Reengineering is a powerful change approach that can bring about radical improvements in business processes. However, the popular management literature has created more myth than practical methodology regarding reengineering. It has relied more heavily on hype than on research, common sense, or lessons of the past. In this paper, we attempt to "demythologize" some key aspects of reengineering by describing what we have observed in our research and practice. Seven reengineering myths are identified, discussed, and dispelled. By separating rhetoric from reality, we hope to help others to have reasonable expectations for success with their reengineering initiatives.