tive put it, "The efficiencies come from being able to spend more of your time dealing with the business issues, and less of your time dealing with infrastructure issues" (Haapaniemi, 1996, p. 25).
Not only will Information Technology outsourcing initiatives like Alcoa's continue to increase, the scope of responsibility of outside consultants is expected to increase as well. An emerging concept in this respect is business process management: "In this approach, traditional vendors such as Andersen Consulting or EDS take on and re-engineer an entire IT-intensive business process, such as accounting, human resources, or customer service" (Haapaniemi, 1996, p. 27).
In re-engineering business processes, Information Technology acts as an enabler for realizing new products that satisfy customer need. The re-engineering process consists of four main subprocesses: goal definition, information acquisition, modelling, and evaluation. The modelling process includes the following subprocesses: choice of modelling philosophy, choice of modelling formalism, and application of formalism to the business process. The two current approaches to modelling business processes are the task-oriented paradigm and the business policy-oriented paradigm. The re-engineering goals affect the selection of the modelling approach. For example, a goal of flexibility during business process execution warrants a business policy-oriented approach whereas a goal of improvement of time and cost of a narrow, well-defined process warrants a task-oriented approach (Tsaigatidou and Junginger, 1995, p. 23).
EDS employed a business-policy oriented approach when it re-engineered its own finance department. The re-engineering at EDS represented a structural change that involved redesigning its finance operations, not simply making the existing one more efficient. EDS's financial staff of 4,000 was spread over 38 business units in 1990. EDS bucked the trend in ...