IT-based change is about process change. It involves people doing different things in different ways with different inputs and different outputs. New or improved IT systems are brought in to either increase efficiency or to allow innovation to occur, not to simply automate what is already there, so process change almost always occurs. But how is this best achieved?

In this section we compare two different approaches to process change. These are BPR (business process re-engineering) and socio-technical design. We look at the pros and cons of these two approaches, and investigate how these two approaches can be combined to offer a new way of successfully improving processes using IT as a lever.