An Executive MBA Program in Business Engineering: A Curriculum Focusing on Change

Abstract

Introduction In many industries, business structures considered as stable over many decades have started to change rapidly, leading to a large bundle of complex, often radical and dramatic transformation needs in affected organizations. During the last decade, as an example, industry structure in financial services has been shifting from a traditional, production-oriented approach (universal banks vs. insurance companies) over a short 'total finance' consolidation phase to a component-based approach where few large, efficient 'factories', many customer-oriented distribution units and many specialized services understand themselves as nodes of an open, flexible business ne twork. In contrast to the consequences of change that are equally covering strategy, processes, leadership, company culture, and information systems (Kelly, 1998), most of the triggers and enablers of change can be located in IT (Evans, Wurster, 1999). Although deregulation and globalization also play an important role, the transformation in the financial services example has been largely enabled by new 'personal' devices that allow customer multi-channel access to financial services anytime and anywhere, by new standardized software packages, by automatic clearing and settlement mechanisms, by powerful data integration and data mining solutions, etc. The emergence of a new layer of service intermediaries is enabled by common access to the Internet and a growing independence of services from physical restrictions that result from paper-based 'production' processes and non-electronic, location-based distribution channels (Hagel, Singer, 1999). Business networking and value chain optimization are enabled by new standardized software packages and particularly by the development of business-oriented negotiation, processing and communication standards (Osterle, Fleisch, Alt, 2000). The management discipline faces massive challenges. Entirely new business models are enabled, while many traditional business models become obsolete. Moreover, integration and automation require a radical redesign of internal processes (Davenport, 1993). Managing alliances, distributed process management, and application integration are recent entries on nearly every top management agenda (Osterle, Fleisch, Alt, 2000). In addition, an in-depth understanding of IT innovations is imperative to assess potential business potentials, and soft skills are needed to align company culture with industry transformation, to influence corporate policy-making, and to implement change. Universities seem not well prepared to 'educate' transformation skills. Like undergraduate programs, most MBA programs focus on traditional, disciplinary knowledge (e.g. marketing, accounting / finance, human resources, operations management, and information systems), although complex transformations require cross-disciplinary skills. Even at renowned business schools, integrated, cross-disciplinary programs focusing on change are hard to find (Team Denzler, 2002). If they exist at all, 'change' programs often are restricted to soft factors and exclude technology issues. 'Techno' MBA programs, on the other hand, focus on technical issues (e.g. communication systems and networks, management information systems, information management, systems development - even programming), and thereby often ignore soft skills. We were no t able to identify university programs that offer coverage over the complete range of topics from the potential assessment of IT innovations to strategy making and from process management and systems development to soft factors. Instead of assembling a new MBA program from existing courses, we chose to first develop a conceptual foundation that tries to integrate these components based on a common vision and a common set of methods and models. Parallel to the 'Enterprise Engineer' approach by Martin (1995), Business Engineering was been proposed initially in the mid 1990s as a holistic methodology for the conceptualization, design, and implementation of IT-enabled business transformation. …