The Social Life of Information

Chapter Four

Practice Makes Process

A company must continue to focus on its processes so that they stay attuned to the needs of the changing business environment. . . .A process-centered organization must strive for ongoing process improvement. To accomplish this, the company must actively manage its processes. Indeed, we can now see that the heart of managing a business is managing its processes: assuring that they are performing up to their potential, looking for opportunities to make them better, and translating these opportunities into realities.

—Michael Hammer, Beyond Reengineering¹

By the late 1980S the cumulative effects of the productivity paradox, the dramatic changes fostered by information technology, the general slowdown in the ...