Focus Issue on Legacy Information Systems and Business Process Change: On the Integrated Design and Evaluation of Business Processes and Information Systems

The role of information systems in influencing and enabling organisational design is widely acknowledged. Yet limited attention is paid to the theoretical legitimacy and conceptual basis of IS-enabled organisational change i.e., business engineering. In this paper we review business engineering’s reference disciplines critically: process-based organisational design, IS development, and IS evaluation. Findings from a case study of business engineering provide empirical support to the theoretical analysis. Synthesis of the conclusions of the review and the case study lead to a number of propositions and potential avenues for further research into the theoretically attractive and practically important field of aligning the design of organisational structures with the design of Information Systems intended to support them.