He is a member of the Class of 1963 and holds the SB and SM in civil engineering. It is about rejecting the conventional wisdom and received assumptions of the past. Reengineering is about inventing new approaches to process structure that bear little or no resemblance to those previous eras. Fundamentally, reengineering is about reversing the industrial revolution. Reengineering is the search for new models of organizing work.
Tradition counts for nothing.
Reengineering is a new beginning. TQM is used within the framework of existing processes and seeks steady incremental enhancements. Yet, TQM and reengineering share common themes. In our case, the customers of our business processes are our students, faculty and staff. TQM is very useful for improving a process that is already well structured and customer focused.