CHOOSING THE PROCESSES TO REENGINEER:
Once processes are identified and mapped, deciding which ones require reengineering and the order in which they should be tackled is not a trivial part of the reengineering effort. No company can reengineer all its high level processes simultaneously.

Typically, organizations use three criteria to help them make their choices.

Broken Processes.  In looking for dysfunction, the most obvious processes to consider are those that a company's executives already know are in trouble. As a rule, people are clear about which processes in their companies need reengineering. The evidence is everywhere and generally hard to miss.
A product development process that hasn't hatched a new product in five years can safely be said to be broken. If employees spend time typing data from a computer printout into a computer terminal or from one terminal into another, whatever process they're working on is probably broken. If people's work cubicle walls and their computer screens are papered with Post-it notes reminding them to fix this or look into that, the processes in which they're involved are probably broken too.

Let's look behind some of these symptoms of process distress or dysfunction to the diseases that usually cause them.

When employees are keying data taken from one computer into another, it is a symptom of what we call "terminal disease." The efficiency minded manager's typical response to a case of terminal disease is to look for a way to rekey the material more quickly or, if the manager is more technologically oriented, to find a way to link the terminals, so the material can travel electronically from one system to another. Both solutions treat the symptom, not the disease.
When the same information travels back and forth among different organizational groups--whether it's rekeyed each time or transmitted electronically--it suggests that a natural activity has been fragmented. Well-designed natural organizational units should send finished products to one another. Extensive communications is a way of coping with unnatural boundaries. The way to fix the problem is to put the pieces of that activity or process back together. Another name for doing that is cross-functional integration, which allows organizations to capture data just one time and then share it, instead of finding faster ways to ship it back and forth.
Terminal disease doesn't involve only computerized data. If people in different parts of the organization have to telephone one another frequently or send a lot of memos or E-mail messages, that probably means a natural process has been inappropriately broken apart. The typical response to this form of terminal disease is to give the people affected by it more communications links--another phone line, a fancier fax, and so forth. But that treats the symptom not the disease. Indeed, the new devices often fail to treat even the symptom. Our version of Parkinson's Law says that "work expands to fill the amount of equipment available for its completion." Give people more communications capacity and they will communicate more and still feel it's not enough.
The fact is--although collaboration may be necessary for some processes--people should not be calling one another more; they should be calling one another less. To treat the disease, we have to find out why two people need to call one another so often. If what they do is so closely linked, maybe it should be done by one person, a case worker, or  by a case team.
From REENGINEERING THE CORPORATION,
by Michael Hammer & James Champy,  1993
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