The business process reengineering movement was accelerated in the mid-1990s by two advances: enterprise-wide information systems and the World Wide Web. Prior to the arrival of enterprise systems,* companies typically had a jumble of separate pieces of software, many of which were not linked. The larger the company, the worse the jumble was. Enterprise systems held out the promise of replacing the jumble with a single, large piece of software† explicitly designed to execute a particular set of cross-functional business processes. This software could be bought “off the shelf” from vendors like
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