Thousands of businesses have reengineered work in order to focus employees on processes that clearly provide value to customers. They have done away with their functional silos and created new organizational structures—process-complete departments—each able to perform all the cross-functional steps or tasks required to meet customers’ needs. Although many of these efforts have paid off in the form of lower costs, shorter cycle times, and greater customer satisfaction, many others have resulted in disappointment: companies have endured the trauma of reengineering only to discover that their performance is no better—and in some cases actually worse—than before.
A version of this article appeared in the September–October 1996 issue of Harvard Business Review.
