Systems Engineering for Business Process Change

A very large proportion of commercial and industrial concerns in the UK find their business competitiveness dependent on huge quantities of already installed, legacy IT. Often, the nature of their business is such that, to remain competitive, they have to be able to change their business processes. Sometimes the required change is radical and revolutionary, but more often the required change is incremental. For such incremental change, a major systems engineering problem arises. The cost and delay involved in changing the installed IT to meet the changed business requirements is much too high. In order to address this issue, the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) set up, in 1996, a managed research program entitled Systems Engineering for Business Process Change (SEBPC). I was appointed as coordinator of the program. The overall aim of this new managed research.