Organizational learning as a test-bed for business process reengineering

Abstract

The fact that a company's learning ability may prevent strategic drift and the fact that many companies are undertaking BPR (business process reengineering) projects leads us to ask whether all these BPR activities promote organizational learning. Within this framework, we studied the extent to which BPR promotes organizational learning by focusing on the project group and the steering committee. This paper is based partly on a theoretical study of the significant characteristics of BPR and of organizational learning and partly on a field study carried out in cooperation with the business unit of Enzyme Business, Novo Nordisk A/S. The result of the analysis is that a correlation between BPR and organizational learning has been established, i.e. the BPR elements: customer focus, process orientation, high level of ambition, clean sheet principle, performance measuring, the business system diamond, and continuous improvements promote organizational learning. However, the high level of ambition, the clean sheet principle and a narrow focus on carrying out a project quickly may have the opposite effect, thereby preventing the organization from learning, and potentially failing to contribute to the avoidance of strategic drift.