Twenty years ago, Jim Champy co-authored one of the most influential business books of all time. Re-engineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution sold more than 3 million copies and spent more than a year on The New York Times Best Seller list. The ideas in that book fueled the growth of many advisory firms, and indeed the entire consulting profession. Two decades later, Champy says those ideas are more important than ever. The reason? At a time when companies must now be more agile and responsive to market demands, many companies, in all sectors, find themselves frozen in the complexity of their technology and process… once again. So, what can we do about it? Champy will lay out his executive roadmap as part of his highly anticipated "Re-engineering Revisited: Why It's More Important Now Than Ever Before" presentation at the Consulting Summit in New York on Oct. 25. Champy recently sat down with Consulting One on One to discuss re-engineering's role today.
Consulting: So, how does re-engineering as you defined it two decades ago apply to today?
Champy: The book was originally published in 1993 but we developed many of the concepts in the late 1980s. The fundamental ideas are still very valid and important. In fact, I could argue that they are more important today than when we first introduced them. Re-engineering, while it benefited many companies, was also a phenomenon that was widely misunderstood by many companies that simply used it as an excuse to downsize rather than fundamentally changing the nature and process of work. We intended re-engineering to be around the fundamental redesign of work. But there were many companies that didn't understand that; or they did understand it but just used the label to apply the label to any restructuring they were doing. The end result was fewer people doing more work. Eventually that led to the degradation of service and that was very unhealthy.
Consulting: What was the core premise of the book?
Champy: We made the case for fundamental work and process change around customers, competition and change. Customers were becoming demanding; competition was becoming more intense and the rate of change was increasing at a pretty dramatic rate. What we were seeing back in the early 1990s was companies that were frozen in old processes. Interestingly, those factors—customers, competition and rate of change—are still present today but they are even more intense.
Consulting: How so?
Champy: Well, we have the phenomenon of the internet, which is giving consumers much more visibility into the operations of organizations, as well as the ability to reach into those operations and those processes. Many companies are unprepared to allow customers to reach in, and they want to and they expect to today. When we wrote this book, competition has increased and every business operates in the context of global competition has intensified. So, we have a more intensified global competitive environment. And thirdly, the rate of change around technology has accelerated.
Consulting: I know you've said that you view technology as both a challenge and an opportunity. Can you expand on that a bit?
Champy: One of the good things is that it cuts both ways. Technology has become the great enabler of process change. When we wrote it in 1993, we did not have the ubiquity of information technology, mobility, Cloud. All of these enable us to more radically redesign processes than ever before. But at the same time, technology strangely has companies frozen once again. I'm struck by the fact that I'm seeing companies more frozen by processes and technology more than they were in the 1990s. That's because many of them have implemented these large complex systems—whether they are home grown, Oracle-based or SAP-based, and they don't allow for the kinds of different channels that are out there today, particularly in the form of social networking or mobility or process change. I've seen companies that simply don't know what to do; they can't respond to business change because they are frozen in these large complex systems. So, technology cuts both ways. It's the great enabler of change but it also has companies frozen. The good news, by the way, is that I haven't seen anyone come up with an easy solution to the problem. It's a great opportunity for the consulting profession to come up with a solution.
Consulting: So, would you say most of the issues today are around technology?
Champy: Many are, for sure, but there is still this huge issue around the work and process, only this time it's focused external to the company. That is a fundamental difference to what we were doing in the 1990s when it was focused internally. Today, the need for work and process change extends out to the customer and all these channels I talked about and the ability for customers to reach in and companies to reach out. For example, as a consumer, I should have the ability to access my healthcare records. They are my records, not my doctor's, not the hospital's. Yet, most healthcare organizations have not been able to deal with that issue. Customers expect to be engaged, and there's still a lot of work to be done in this area.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.