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TopResearch Background
The broad area of business process redesign and management has been a fertile area of research, with or without a strong focus on information technology (IT), particularly in the last 15 years (Baskerville & Smithson, 1995; Newkirk et al., 2008). Many important research issues have been addressed, and many relevant research questions have been successfully answered. Harmful misconceptions regarding process redesign have been exposed (Davenport & Stoddard, 1994), and the role of IT as an enabler of new redesigned processes has been identified and explained (Cunningham & Finnegan, 2004; Venkatraman, 1994). Key preconditions of process redesign success have been identified (Bashein & Markus, 1994; Clemons et al., 1995; Teng et al., 1998), approaches to assess success have been proposed (Berente et al., 2009; Börjesson & Mathiassen, 2004; Davenport, 1993), and related change management techniques have been studied and validated (Kettinger & Grover, 1995; Stoddard & Jarvenpaa, 1995). New methods and automated tools for process redesign have been proposed (Nissen, 1998), and successful approaches for implementation of new process designs have been identified (Grover et al., 1995).
In spite of the progress above, some areas of research in connection with process redesign have received relatively little attention. One such area is that of process representation approaches and their impact on the outcomes of process redesign projects (Katzenstein & Lerch, 2000). This area arguably needs its share of research attention, since the way processes are looked at is likely to strongly influence the way in which they are redesigned (Berente et al., 2009).