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Michael Hammer Quotes

1948–2008 United States

Michael Martin Hammer (13 April 1948 – 3 Sept 2008) was an American engineer, management author, and a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), known as one of the founders of the management theory of Business process reengineering (BPR).

United States
Academics
Business theorists
Engineers

Random Michael Hammer quote

9 quotes

To succeed at reengineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker.

Reengineering cannot be planned meticulously and accomplished in small and cautious steps. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition with an uncertain result.

THIS BOOK is not about reengineering; it is about reengineering’s consequences, about its aftermath and its abiding legacy.

Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer.

Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.

A business process is a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. A business process has a goal and is affected by events occurring in the external world or in other processes.

America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth. We need something entirely different

p. 30; cited in: Huey B. Long (1995)

The genesis of reengineering lies in a phrase one of us coined in the late 1980s: “Automating a mess yields an automated mess.” Unless an organization reconceptualized its operations, overlaying new technology on these operations accomplished little.

It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should “reengineer” our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Hammer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.