Prediction Machines, Updated and Expanded

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Deconstructing Workflows

In the midst of the IT revolution, businesses asked, “How should we implement computers in our business?” For some, the answer was easy: “Find where we do lots of calculations and substitute computers for humans; they’re better, faster, and cheaper.” For other businesses, it was less obvious. Nonetheless, they experimented. But the fruits of those experiments took time to materialize. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate economist, lamented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”1

From this challenge came an interesting business movement called “reengineering.” In 1993, Michael Hammer and James Champy, in their book Reengineering the Corporation, argued that to use the new general-purpose ...