Mike and I were working together at the beginning of “reengineering.” We found some PRISM sponsors, including IBM, Mutual Benefit Life, and Hewlett-Packard, that had dramatically improved their business processes through the use of IT. This message, of course, recurred throughout his career. Instead, he argued, the procedures should be redesigned to take advantage of the new technologies. When I met him in 1983, he was well into a process-focused perspective on “office automation.” His perspective was that it didn’t make sense to use office automaton tools–word processing, copiers, etc.–to support existing office procedures. I don’t know much about his life and work there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he focused on the process of compiler design–or some other process-oriented topic–at that time. Mike was trained as an electrical and computer engineer at MIT, and then became a professor. In Isaiah Berlin’s taxonomy, he was clearly a hedgehog–he knew one thing really well, and that thing was his lens on almost every aspect of business. The only next big thing that he was really interested in was how organizations can improve how they do their work. What we owe Mike for most is his relentless focus on business processes and their radical improvement. Anyone who writes on the “next big thing” owes him a major debt, and I learned a lot from him. I worked closely with Mike for seven or eight years, and together we started a successful research program on IT management called PRISM. You probably heard that Mike Hammer, often known as the “ father of reengineering,” died unexpectedly at age 60 few weeks ago.
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