<P> These are vital factors that contribute to building an effective IT infrastructure for business processes . BPR must be accompanied by strategic planning which addresses leveraging IT as a competitive tool . An IT infrastructure is made up of physical assets, intellectual assets, shared services, and their linkages . The way in which the IT infrastructure components are composed and their linkages determines the extent to which information resources can be delivered . An effective IT infrastructure composition process follows a top - down approach, beginning with business strategy and IS strategy and passing through designs of data, systems, and computer architecture . </P> <P> Linkages between the IT infrastructure components, as well as descriptions of their contexts of interaction, are important for ensuring integrity and consistency among the IT infrastructure components . Furthermore, IT standards have a major role in reconciling various infrastructure components to provide shared IT services that are of a certain degree of effectiveness to support business process applications, as well as to guide the process of acquiring, managing, and utilizing IT assets . The IT infrastructure shared services and the human IT infrastructure components, in terms of their responsibilities and their needed expertise, are both vital to the process of the IT infrastructure composition . IT strategic alignment is approached through the process of integration between business and IT strategies, as well as between IT and organizational infrastructures . </P> <P> Most analysts view BPR and IT as irrevocably linked . Walmart, for example, would not have been able to reengineer the processes used to procure and distribute mass - market retail goods without IT . Ford was able to decrease its headcount in the procurement department by 75 percent by using IT in conjunction with BPR, in another well - known example . The IT infrastructure and BPR are interdependent in the sense that deciding the information requirements for the new business processes determines the IT infrastructure constituents, and a recognition of IT capabilities provides alternatives for BPR . Building a responsive IT infrastructure is highly dependent on an appropriate determination of business process information needs . This, in turn, is determined by the types of activities embedded in a business process, and their sequencing and reliance on other organizational processes . </P> <P> Al - Mashari and Zairi (2000) suggest that BPR involves changes in people behavior and culture, processes, and technology . As a result, there are many factors that prevent the effective implementation of BPR and hence restrict innovation and continuous improvement . Change management, which involves all human and social related changes and cultural adjustment techniques needed by management to facilitate the insertion of newly designed processes and structures into working practice and to deal effectively with resistance, is considered by many researchers to be a crucial component of any BPR effort. One of the most overlooked obstacles to successful BPR project implementation is resistance from those whom implementers believe will benefit the most . Most projects underestimate the cultural effect of major process and structural change and as a result, do not achieve the full potential of their change effort . Many people fail to understand that change is not an event, but rather a management technique . </P>

Cultural change is usually a short-term process implemented by top management