Automate or Cultivate? Reengineering Versus Knowledge Management
Companies argue about whether better results come from streamlining the work or nurturing people's know-how. The first answer arrived with great force during the era of business process reengineering. Its champions urged firms to scrap their old routines and use technology to heavily automate and streamline how work gets done (Hammer, 1990; Davenport, 1993, as cited in Bodrožić & Adler, 2018). Do not just improve the existing process, they said, but tear it down and rebuild it around what technology now makes possible.
The key insight: the same technology can wipe out human expertise or amplify it — the question is never whether to automate, but what you point the tools at.
Critics soon raised a serious worry. They argued that this approach treats people as interchangeable parts and, in its rush to automate, throws away the hard-won, often unspoken know-how that experienced workers carry around (Bodrožić & Adler, 2018). Efficiency gained by wiping out routines can also wipe out the practical wisdom buried in those routines and in the workers who run them. The firm gets leaner and, at the same time, quietly dumber.
The clash exposed a real question: where does a company's value actually live? If value lives in efficient, well-designed processes, then automating aggressively makes sense and human quirks are mostly waste. If value lives in the knowledge and judgment of skilled people, then stripping out that human side to streamline things destroys the very thing that made the company good. The two views point to opposite uses of the same technology.
A blend emerges in something called knowledge management, which points technology at a different goal. Instead of using tools to replace people, knowledge management uses them to support and connect skilled workers and the groups they belong to (Bodrožić & Adler, 2018). Technology becomes a way to capture, share, and boost what skilled people know, linking experts across the company rather than engineering them out of it. The aim shifts from replacing people to strengthening them.
So the answer is to change the question from whether to use technology to how. Reengineering and knowledge management both embrace powerful tools, but they aim those tools at opposite targets, one at wiping out human variation and the other at empowering human expertise. The grown-up approach treats technology as a way to boost people, not replace them. Automating and nurturing stop being rivals once technology is pointed at strengthening the human side rather than discarding it.
Where this fits in the SalesEvolution system
This is the defining choice in how sales teams adopt AI. Point it at "replace the reps" and you discard the relationship skill and judgment that win complex B2B deals; point it at "amplify the reps" — surfacing insight, automating drudgery, connecting expertise — and you get a stronger team. That distinction is the whole thesis of human-AI sales collaboration and our caution in the dark side of sales technology. Aiming the tools at strengthening people is what our coaching and training help leaders do.
Every claim above links to its peer-reviewed source; browse the full research & sources.
Frequently asked questions
What was business process reengineering?
It was an approach urging firms to scrap their old routines and use technology to heavily automate and streamline how work gets done — not just improving existing processes but tearing them down and rebuilding around what technology makes possible. Critics warned it treated people as interchangeable parts and discarded the tacit know-how experienced workers carry.
How does knowledge management differ?
Knowledge management points technology at the opposite target. Instead of using tools to replace people, it uses them to capture, share, and amplify what skilled workers know and to connect experts across the company. The aim shifts from replacing people to strengthening them.
What's the real question about technology in organizations?
Not whether to use it, but how to aim it. Reengineering and knowledge management both embrace powerful tools but point them at opposite goals — one at wiping out human variation, the other at empowering human expertise. The mature approach treats technology as a way to boost people, not discard them.
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