Information Architectural Design in Business Process Reengineering

Abstract

Business process reengineering and information architecture share a common strategic and business process focus. Both can be mutually supportive of each other's objectives. Information architecture design can produce a stable IA capable of supporting existing as well as improved business processes. Reciprocally, business process redesign (BPR) provides a high profile business justification for the IA endeavour. Given proper collaboration between corporate and IT strategic planners, both BPR and IA efforts should produce a number of valuable common outputs. These include the identification of business processes within an organization, the prioritization of these processes based on their strategic relevance, the establishment of process performance measures, and the modelling of these processes and their supporting information resources. A synergistic model of IA and BPR is presented and selected IA techniques and modelling methods are recommended. Future research is suggested concerning the need to test the relationship between BPR and IA.