Reengineering the Corporation

The business environment today is one of the most volatile times in history, parallels can be made to the years following the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the printing press. The internet has been another revolution. It has revolutionized how consumers find services and products, it has changed the way we work, and has changed the way we interact with coworkers, suppliers, and customers. But technology like the internet is not solely responsible for the amount of productivity gains over the last 40 years. According to Hammer and Champy in "Reengineering the Corporation", technology is merely a tool used in the transformative process. Advances in technology and reengineering are co-dependent, but they also require changes in process and organizational structure to be fully effective.

The Industrial Revolution reignited a revolution that took place billions of years ago on the cellular level, giving us complex life, and relatively recently on a geologic scale was introduced into the corporate way of thinking. It is the notion that parts of a job can be broken down into bite sized pieces, and processed more quickly and consistently if handled by people specially trained to do specific work, or put simply, division of labor. The gains in quality and lowering of labor costs far exceeded the overhead of managers and the reassembling of parts to make a final product. But the gains were not all from a specialization of skills. Division of labor, or the factory model, coupled with emerging technologies like steam power and the abundance of coal, gave nations like Great Britain a huge advantage in the manufacturing and transportation of goods. The standard of living of the average citizen in England increased, despite wages stagnating, because higher quality, lower-cost goods were available. This lead an 18th century Scottish economist, Adam Smith, to probe the causes and relationship between nations and their wealth in his series of