Business Process Management

Internally, the delivery of products and services to customers is the end result of co-ordinated activities by different groups working within the business. Companies seem to go through an irreversible life cycle that leads them towards specialisation, complexity and functional parochialism. However hard we try to avoid the situation developing, the entrepreneurial start of the business, where everyone can virtually do any of the necessary tasks within it, slowly evolves into functions. As functions clone staff together over the years, the rigid development of formal functional structures has provided the opportunity for functions to become fortresses, the contents of which become the jealously guarded property of the occupants. Inside each fortress allegiances are high and people speak their own language, a mechanism to spot intruders and confuse communication.