Process centering or building an organization with a business process orientation has led to many reported successes. Texas Instruments, Progressive Insurance and American Standard Companies have all been reported, albeit anecdotally, as receiving improved business performance from building a process orientation within an organization (Hammer 1996). Business process orientation has also led to successes when applied to medium and small scale business that is properly setup. Process orientation, and its relationship to improved cross-functional interaction, was introduced almost fifteen years ago by Michael Porter. He introduced the concept of interoperability across the value chain as a major issue within firms (Porter 1985). W. Edwards Deming also contributed with the “Deming Flow Diagram” depicting the connections across the firm from the customer to the supplier as a process that could be measured and improved like any other process (Walton 1986). Thomas Davenport and James Short (1990) described a process orientation within an organization as a key component in the “New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign.” Michael Hammer also presented the business process orientation concept as an essential ingredient of a successful “reengineering” effort. Hammer coined this term to describe the development of a customer focused, strategic business process based organization enabled by rethinking the assumptions in a process oriented way and utilizing information technology as a key enabler (Hammer, 1993). Hammer offers reengineering as a strategy to overcome the problematic cross-functional activities that are presenting major performance issues to firms and cites many examples of successes and failures in his series of books and articles. Hallmark and Wal-Mart are often put forward as success stories and IBM and GM as the failures. Culture is a major theme in the examples cited. A “business process culture” is a culture that is cross-functional, customer oriented along with process and system thinking. This can be expanded by Davenport’s definition of process orientation as consisting of elements of structure, focus, measurement, ownership and customers (Davenport 1993). Davenport also stressed commitment to process improvement that directly benefits the customer and business process information oriented systems as a major component of this culture Finally, Hammer (Hammer 1993, 1995, 1996, 1999) described “process thinking” as cross-functional and outcome oriented. He also used four categories to describe the components of an organization. These are: Business Processes Jobs and Structures Management and Measurement Systems Values and Beliefs The Definition of BPO To establish a more solid foundation,