The genesis of reengineering lies in a phrase one of us coined in the late 1980s: “Automating a mess yields an automated mess.” Unless an organization reconceptualized its operations, overlaying new technology on these operations accomplished little.

— Michael Martin Hammer, Reengineering the Corporation (1993)

From Reengineering the Corporation (1993); the phrase was coined by one of its co-authors.

Topics: software engineering