Business Process Change: A Manager's Guide to Improving, Redesigning, and Automating Processes (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)

Every company wants to improve the way it does business, to produce goods and services more efficiently, and to increase profits. Nonprofit organizations are also concerned with efficiency, productivity, and with achieving the goals they set for themselves. Every manager understands that achieving these goals is a part of his or her job.

In the wake of the dot-com collapse, managers are trying to figure out how they can take advantage of email, the Internet, and the Web to improve their business process. At the same time, managers are interested in developing business process architectures and measurement systems that align business processes with corporate goals. Managers face many options in approaching these problems. Business Process Change provides an overview of the options and describes a variety of business process techniques proven by successful companies over the course of a decade.

*Focuses on the process change problems faced by today's managers.
*Summarizes the state of the art of business process analysis & improvement, including the basic vocabulary of modeling.
*Presents a methodology based on the best practices available that can be tailored for specific needs and that maintains a focus on the human aspects of process redesign.
*Offers detailed case studies showing how these methods are implemented.

Paul Harmon is the founder and chief strategy officer of Enterprise Alignment and the executive editor of Business Process Trends Newsletter. He has coauthored many books, including Developing E-Business Systems and Architectures: A Manager's Guide, The Object Technology Casebook (Wiley), and the international bestseller Expert Systems: Artificial Intelligence for Business (Wiley).