Alive and Kicking: A Case Study of BPR within a UK Police Force

This paper examines the implementation of a Business Process Analysis (BPA) initiative within a UK police force. Utilising a case study outlining a BPR initiative, we evaluate and critique the adoption of the BPR concept, illustrating how a reduced ‘incremental’ form of BPR can be implemented without distorting its original conceptualisation. We argue that this form of BPR is most suitable for small organisations and for those, such as public sector divisions, which have limited freedom in implementing change across the organisation as a whole. For organisations such as the police force, further restrictions emanate from a highly regulated external environment, with simultaneous demands for better value for [public] money. Process re-engineering can be managed by a careful selection of appropriate tools and techniques, directed towards a clearly defined objective and framed as a problem paradigm. We encourage academics and practitioners to reflect more critically upon many of the [negative] assumptions surrounding BPR, particularly those relating to its apparent enormity and scale. The plea is, not to discard BPR as an option for managing change, perhaps in favour of more fashionable theories, but to embrace Hammer’s (1990) spirit of ‘radicalism’ when tackling even small scale, organisational change.