APPLyING ANTHROPOLOGy IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGy DEPLOyMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION EFFORTS: bUSINESS PROCESSES REDESIGN IN THE ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES

O of the most fundamental assumptions held by applied anthropologists is the view that the anthropological perspective can be fruitfully applied in any human endeavor. As stated by P. Higgins and A. Paredes in their introductory notes to Classics of Practicing Anthropology 1978-1998 (Society for Applied Anthropology, 2000), this has been the underlying philosophy of Practicing Anthropology since its first publication. The following paper describes how the anthropological perspective is being fruitfully applied by the author in a relatively recent human endeavor: using information technology to redesign/restructure/reengineer organizational processes, structures and culture. Practitioners of Information Technology and Management consultants use the cover terms Business Processes Reengineering (BPR) and more recently Business Processes Management (BPM) when they refer to this type of activity. Despite the extensive literature on BPR since the early 1990’s and on BPM starting in 2000, I do not know about any explicit attempt to apply anthropological method and theory to BPR-related efforts. In this paper, I wish to state some of the generic potential benefits of anthropology to any BPR-related efforts and demonstrate this using concrete examples from a three years applied research effort conducted by the author during 1998-2000 in the Israeli Defense Forces. APPLyING ANTHROPOLOGy IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGy DEPLOyMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION EFFORTS: bUSINESS PROCESSES REDESIGN IN THE ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES