Business process reengineering and workflow automation: a technology transfer experience Lerina Aversano, Gerardo Canfora * , Andrea De Lucia, Pierpaolo Gallucci Faculty of Engineering, University of Sannio, Palazzo Bosco Lucarelli, Piazza Roma , 82100 Benevento, Italy Received 8 November 2000; received in revised form 27 March 2001; accepted 14 May 2001 Abstract Inthelastfewyearsmanypublicandprivateorganizationshavebeenchangingthewayofthinkingtheirbusinessprocessesto improvethequalityofdeliveredserviceswhileachievingbetterefficiencyandefficacy.Thispaperpresentsresultsandlessonslearned from an on-going technology-transfer research project aimed at introducing service and technology innovation within a peripheral publicadministrationwhiletransferringenablingworkflowmethodologiesandtechnologiestolocalSmallandMediumEnterprises (SMEs).Wediscussaprocessreverseengineeringapproachanditsapplicationinthetechnologytransferproject.Wealsodiscussan approach for evaluation and assessment of workflow technology and present a prototype implementation for a selected process of the subject organization. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. 1.Introduction Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is ‘‘the fun- damental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed’’ (Hammer and Champy, 1993). In the last few years many organizations have been changing the way of thinking about their business processes to keep competitive in the global market. In particular, Internet is emerging as a key enabling tech- nology for most BPR projects. Workflow management is another example of technology that enables process performance improvement in a cooperative networking environment (Georgakopoulos et al., 1995). A Work- flow Management System (WfMS) enables process au- tomationthroughtheintegration,thecoordination,and thecommunicationofbothhumanandautomatictasks of a business process (Workflow Management Coali- tion, 1996). In addition, most WfMSs of the last gen- eration are web based (Ames et al., 1996) and much effort is being made towards workflow interoperability; this is recognized as a key to e-commerce and process scalability, as it enables to move towards a virtual or- ganization model by remodeling both the organization structure and its processes, coordinating work between distributedgroupsofemployees,andsharingworkwith business partners (suppliers and customers) (Workflow Management Coalition, 2000). Public Administration (PA) is also sensible to BPR, as often the services it provides are critical for the business of citizens and organizations. The terms busi- ness-to-administration and consumer-to-administration havebeenintroducedinthee-commerceterminologyto refer to activities that involve PAs. The driver for BPR in the PA can be of different types: • new legislation; • new services; • new technology. Largescaleredesignofprocessesinvolvingoneormore PA departments often requires new laws. However, service and technology innovation (that can be applied withintheexistinglaws)mightsignificantlyimprovethe existing processes and the way services are delivered to The Journal of Systems and Software 63 (2002) 29–44 www.elsevier.com/locate/jss * Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-0824-305804; fax: +39-0824- 21866. E-mail addresses: aversano@unisannio.it (L. Aversano), can- fora@unisannio.it (G. Canfora), delucia@unisannio.it (A. De Lucia), gallucci@unisannio.it (P. Gallucci). 0164-1212/01/$ - see front matter Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII:S0164-1212(01)00128-5