Chapter 1: Groupware - The Changing Environment

By David Coleman

ISBN# 0-13-727728-8, Copyright 1997, 720 pp.
Now available through Prentice Hall

1.11 Groupware and Re-engineering

As stated earlier in the chapter, groupware is a technology used often to support the process of re-engineering. Unfortunately, many who have taken the path to re-engineering have failed. Michael Hammer, the prophet of re-engineering, predicted that American companies will spend $32 billion this year in re-engineering efforts and that two thirds of those efforts will fail!

When the roadblocks to re-engineering were examined by a 1993 Delloite-Touche survey, it turned out that re-engineering (like the technology it uses—groupware) has two major obstacles: people and technology.

Re-engineering, per se, is a misnomer, as many processes were not engineered in the first place. Business processes tend to develop under the pressure of finding a way to get something done—quickly. Often these processes are not well thought out, but are invented by the person responsible for the task. Their ingenuity becomes policy and is implemented on paper. A bureaucracy grows up around these processes and people get jobs based upon the inefficiencies of the processes. So, of course, when a re-engineering program comes along, they are resistant.

By nature, people are resistant to change, and even more resistant to being told what to do and how to do it (at least in our culture). This resistance becomes the greatest organizational problem in re-engineering. The second problem, technological, can be defined in terms of the limitations of existing systems. Without solving both problems simultaneously, your enterprise may not be successful in re-engineering or with groupware.