Re-engineering Sri Lankan organizations : role of ICT and critical success factors

Abstract

According to the surveys, today most of the government and private sector organizations/companies are performing process re-engineering. It is a fact that business world and the technology are facing rapid changes. In consequence, it is required to respond rapidly to the changing demands in order to be in conformity with competitors and improving services, streamlining the business processes, minimizing the cost and uplifting the staff motivation etc. Most of the organizations face enormous difficulties in meeting challenges due to the inherent complexities involved in current business processes and procedures. The solution is process re-engineering. However, due to lack of maturity in this area, most of the organizations are in slow progress or abandoned their projects and some have invested huge sums of money for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This project address to identify the effectivity of enablers and inhibitors (Critical Success Factors) of the re-engineering and how the role of ICT influences the success of Re-engineering projects. In this connection, selected 32 organizations/institutes from both in government and private sector were examined. During the pilot studies done at People's Bank, participation of workshops and seminars, discussions made with Reengineering team leaders and literature survey, it was possible to find their approaches, role of ICT and concerned Critical Success Factors which have greatly influenced the Reengineering process in Sri Lankan organizations. As far as the Role of ICT is concerned, efforts were made to find out how e-technology is incorporated in the 3 phases of reengineering process: before the process is designed, while the process designs in underway and after design is complete. Base on those knowledge, conceptualize model was drawn and a structured questionnaire was prepared and distributed to more than 80 persons covering 32 organizations. One to one interviews were conducted with most of them with a view to getting open- ended answers. Gathered information was analyzed in two ways such as basic and advance analysis. In this scenario more attention was made to analyze and highlight different views obtained from both in private and government sectors. These findings can be very vital to those who are planning re-engineering projects. Based on all these findings a set of recommendations were made which enable effective implementation of Re-engineering projects in Sri Lanka.