Due to growing concern about the competitiveness of industry in the international marketplace and the efficiency ofgovernment enterprises, widespread initiatives are currently underway to enhance thecompetitive posture offirms and to streamline government operations. Nearly all enterprises are engaged in assessing ways in which their productivity, product quality and operations can be improved. These efforts canbe described as Business Process Engineering (BPE). BPE had its roots in industry under differing titIes: Process Improvement, Process Simplification, Process Innovation, Reengineering, etc. It has matured to be an important ingredient of successful enterprises in the private and public sectors. After extensive exploitation by industrial and governmental practitioners and consultants, it is attracting increasing attention from academics in the fields of engineering and business. However, even with all of this attention in the popular literature, serious scholarly literature on BPE is in short supply. TItis is somewhat surprising, especially since so many large international organizations have attempted BPE projectswith varied success.

The purpose of Business Process Engineering: Advancing the State of the Art is to outline the structure of Business Process Engineering (BPE), its practices, methods, and theory for implementing successful organization restructuring. BPE is the design and implementation of efficient and effective business processes, and the corresponding alignment of enabling information technologies and systems. The editors have assembled the best research on BPE and recreated a structured volume that provides academic researchers and practitioners with a theoretical and practical framework for implementing specific BPE solutions for business and government. Hence, the book covers theoretical efforts towards the creation of new methods in BPE and practical issues that relate to its actual implementation in the real world of business and government. Authors from industry, government, and academia have contributed individual chapters. The emphasis is on methodology that can be replicated. Industry and governmental contributors have provided a synthesis of BPE experiences or individual case studies. In both cases, the work is intended to lead to lessons learned that may be successfully employed by others. The academically oriented chapters relate BPE methodologies to other forms of organizational change, building on previous research in related areas. The chapters are grouped as follows: Structures for BPE, Model Development, Information Technology for BPE, Tools for BPE, and Case Studies of BPE. The goal of this volume is to present works that clarify the definition of the field and establish factors that lead to success in implementation. The editors' premise is that the objective of BPE is to bringabout organizational improvement by the application of scientific principles and the use of enabling information technologies. This new methodology, founded and nurtured in practice, will evolve into a mature academic field that will involve many diverse academic disciplines. This volume is intended to contribute to that development.