Human-Centered Reengineering: The Integration of Human Factors into Business Reengineering

Abstract

Business reengineering is currently being employed by many companies to maintain and improve their effectiveness. However, 50% to 70% of all reengineering efforts fail to accomplish their objectives. Although business reengineering and human factors approaches to work process reengineering share many goals, their approaches differ in four significant ways: (1) a top-down vs. a bottom-up approach; (2) starting from scratch vs. learning from an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of the existing work environment, (3) relying mainly on data from management vs. data from workers at all levels, and (4) treating processes and systems independently without a view of the worker at the center vs. a worker-centered integrated approach to process and system design. An integration of human factors approaches into business reengineering can increase the success of reengineering efforts. Data from projects where human factors specialists worked on reengineering efforts illustrate the mutual benefit to both types of work that can be gained through collaboration.