Current business process redesign practices, in the defense sector as well as in business in general, are based on several assumptions inherited from Taylor's scientific management method, including the key assumption that activity-flow representations should provide the basis for business process redesign. While this assumption was probably correct for most organizations in the early 1900s, it is clearly inconsistent with the fact that, currently "information" is what flows the most in business processes, even in manufacturing organizations. This project is based on the key assumption that the current focus of business process redesign approaches should be on information flows rather than activity flows.
The main goal of this project is to develop a
methodology for redesigning acquisition processes based on knowledge and
information-flow analysis. The methodology, called InfoDesign, focuses on the
knowledge embedded in a business process, the information processing resources
involved in execution of the process, and the information flowing through the
process. The InfoDesign methodology was developed and partially validated
during a one-year project. The validation of the methodology was conducted as
an action research study in which one acquisition process involving the U.S.
Government and one key supplier was analyzed and redesigned. The results of
the study support the key assumption on which InfoDesign was built - that
current business process redesign approaches should focus on information flows rather than activity flows.
