The role of information technology and social enablers in business process reengineering: An empirical investigation integrating positivist and interpretivist approaches.

摘要

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been described as the "hottest" management topic of this decade, and the role of information technology and organizational/social enablers has been recognized as a central yet poorly understood aspect of BPR. Much of the existing BPR literature consists of opinion pieces and non-academic case studies conducted without adequate controls on validity or without reflection on the positivist epistemological stance adopted implicitly. Through an analysis of the literature, this study first identifies three competing perspectives (technologically-oriented, socially-oriented and sociotechnical) explaining the role of technological and social enablers in the redesign of business processes and in the implementation of BPR-related organizational change. Next, process theory propositions classified under the three perspectives are tested in the positivist tradition using two case studies. Finally, one of the rejected propositions is reformulated by interpretively revisiting the same two case studies, thus illustrating the benefits of integrating positivist and interpretivist approaches.