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Business Process Management Journal

Reengineering the undergraduate business core curriculum: aligning business schools


with business for improved performance
Kenton B. Walker, Ervin L. Black,
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Kenton B. Walker, Ervin L. Black, (2000) "Reengineering the undergraduate business core curriculum:
aligning business schools with business for improved performance", Business Process Management
Journal, Vol. 6 Issue: 3, pp.194-213, https://doi.org/10.1108/14637150010313366
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BPMJ
6,3 Reengineering the
undergraduate business core
curriculum: aligning business
194
schools with business for
improved performance
Kenton B. Walker
University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA and
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Ervin L. Black
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
Keywords BPR, Business schools, Process management, Undergraduates
Abstract Presents and supports a process-centered model of undergraduate business education
for the core business curriculum and business school management, consistent with the trend
toward process-managed organizations. This model conforms to calls from the public, academic
community, and business leaders for improved performance of business faculties and educational
institutions and increased capabilities in business school graduates. Outlines five business process
courses for the business core curriculum. Benefits of this approach include providing a framework
for formulating and implementing a strategy for developing the business curriculum and
elimination of redundancy in the coverage of topical material. In addition, the process approach
provides a vehicle for the development of interdisciplinary faculty, encourages attention to the
need to change, and provides a basis for aligning faculty and institutional reward systems.

Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to present and support a process-centered model of
business education, consistent with the trend toward process-managed
organizations (Martinsons, 1995). We discuss how a process-oriented
curriculum can provide a broader and more integrated educational experience
for business students, conforming to recommendations from the academic
community and demands by business leaders for increased capabilities in
business school graduates. In addition, this proposal addresses some of the
problems faced by business schools and faculties identified in the AACSB
Faculty Leadership Task Force Report (1996). These problems include lack of
alignment between business faculty skills and the rapidly changing needs of
business, a linear, disciplinary focus to business education, and faculty reward
systems that are inconsistent with those of their institutions.
Business education has been subjected to considerable scrutiny and
experimentation since the late 1980s as business school enrollments dropped.
Porter and McKibbin (1988) report that most undergraduate business programs
Business Process Management
follow a pedagogical model developed decades ago. As a result, these schools
Journal, Vol. 6 No. 3, 2000,
pp. 194-213. # MCB University
do a disservice to students and employers by continuing to teach business
Press, 1463-7154 functions as discrete activities (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1984; Byrne,
1993; Harvard Business Review, 1992). More recently, Stover et al. (1997) relate Aligning
the need to ``break down the silos'' in business education by integrating business schools
traditional courses in the business curriculum. These views underscore the
need for business schools to adopt structures that are responsive and flexible,
as their employer-customers have to succeed in a competitive environment.
During the past decade, business process reengineering (BPR), or process
management, concepts have been widely applied in the business world to achieve 195
efficiency and effectiveness and to be customer-oriented. The application of BPR
in the context of higher education is a more recent phenomenon (Porter, 1993;
Olson, 1993). Many academic leaders have publicly recognized the challenges
confronting business education that are parallel to those confronting much of
Corporate America (Harvard Business Review, 1992; Witt, 1994; AACSB, 1996,
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1998). Rapid changes in business organizations to improve efficiency and


effectiveness place pressure on schools of business to operate in a similar fashion
(Davis and Mehta, 1997). Although many individuals are investigating and
implementing new technologies to radically change the classroom, pedagogical
tools, and instructional delivery to reengineer the teaching and learning process,
much work remains to achieve significant efficiency and effectiveness benefits
(Olson, 1993).
In order to solve these problems, there needs to be a central theme to
integrate the activities and management of business schools in a realistic
fashion. This paper presents a framework for integrating elements of the core
business curriculum and administration of business faculty based on the
concept of business processes. This approach permits business students to
learn how each of the business disciplines contributes to the important
activities of an organization. In addition, the process-based approach provides
for more effective management of business school resources.
In the remainder of this paper we present a foundation for an alternative
approach to organizing, delivering, and managing business education. The
concept of business process is explained and related to business education. We
provide an outline for a process-centered business core curriculum, and discuss
challenges to and advantages of the process approach.

A brief history of the organization and management of work


To understand the future of business education, we need to review the past.
The structure and management of work in most organizations today can be
traced to Adam Smith's principle of the division of labor, described in The
Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1776). In this book, Smith described how the
fragmentation of labor, applied in a pin factory, could yield huge improvements
in worker productivity and lower costs. Following this example, American
companies became the best in the world at translating Smith's organizing
principles into the workplace. Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan are notable in their
success at applying the division of labor to developing the assembly line at the
Ford Motor Company and to management at General Motors. This model is
still prevalent today in all types of organizations.
BPMJ The dominant approach to business education is patterned after the Harvard
6,3 University model of a core (Nelson, 1990). The theory behind the model is that
knowledge should be compartmentalized into courses; courses are integrated
into the core; and cores are combined into curricula. Business schools are
typically organized into functional departments of accounting, finance,
marketing, management, and so forth, under the assumption that the delivery
196 of business education can be best accomplished by dividing the effort
according to areas of specialty. Cheney (1989) criticized this approach for its
lack of interdisciplinary core courses.
Dividing work into more pieces was a successful approach to managing the
workplace for generations. However, changes in the business environment
have caused many to rethink this approach (for example, see Seeley, 1994).
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Among the changes in the business environment are:


(1) a customer revolution in demand for variety, change, speed, and
response to increased world-wide buying power;
(2) advances in technology creating a substitution of knowledge for capital;
(3) a global reorganization of economies and changing paradigms about
competition; and
(4) ``complete competence'', in a broad sense, is needed at more levels (firms
and individuals).
Bennigson (1996) argues that the functional divisions created within
organizations contribute to perceived contradictions in goals and internal
competition that result in confusion, wasted energy, and squandered strategic
capital. These ``Balkanized'' organizations (an analogy to conditions in the
Balkans characterized by conflicts over boundaries, beliefs, and history), with
their hierarchical values and functional silos, are not able to respond to a
marketplace that demands flexibility and customer responsiveness. This
characterization may also be applied to business schools, which have similar
hierarchical values and functional silos.

Business processes
Efforts to improve organizational performance by changing how the flow of work
is managed have led to development of the management technique commonly
known as business process reengineering (BPR) (Teng et al., 1996). BPR entails a
fundamental rethinking of all aspects of an organization and its activities. BPR
defines organizations in terms of a system of business processes and critically
examines the processes to identify opportunities for improvement. These reviews
often show that organizations can significantly improve performance by
redesigning the way processes operate. For example, both production and
advertising functions contribute to launching a new product. The management of
these groups via physical contact and/or information sharing will affect the
success of a new product initiative. In the remainder of this section we define
process, provide examples of processes, illustrate differences between functional Aligning
and process-managed organizations, discuss how processes may be identified, business schools
and consider implications of the process perspective for business education.
Process must be well understood to be able to apply it in a business,
business school, or to develop a process-centered business curriculum. Hammer
and Champy (1993) define business process as ``a collection of activities that
takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the 197
customer''. Davenport (1993) states that process ``implies a strong emphasis on
how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus's
emphasis on what.'' This definition is concerned with ordering or structure of
work. Processes should be evaluated against process goals, not department or
function goals, because most key processes cut across functional boundaries
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(Rummler and Brache, 1995). Processes can be evaluated in terms of usefulness,


consistency, defect rates, and many other measures. Organizations are only as
effective as are their processes (Hammer, 1996).
Traditional business organizations and business schools take a vertical
perspective on the structure and management of work. The outputs of each
business function are regarded as discreet. Consistent with the writings of
Adam Smith, this structure supports the view that the performance of
organizations is maximized by focusing attention on the efficiency and
effectiveness of each department. However, functional optimization often does
not lead to organizational optimization and is not consistent with the idea of
integrated processes (Hammer and Champy, 1993; Davenport, 1993; Rummler
and Brache, 1995). As a result, colleges of business may be successful at
graduating competent accountants, marketers, and financiers, but not in
developing good business graduates (Harvard Business Review, 1992).
Rummler and Brache (1995) contend that organizations produce their
outputs through a variety of cross-functional work processes such as product
development, sales, and manufacturing. For example, the sales and collection
process might begin with a telephone order placed by a customer, and end with
the deposit of cash. This process might involve personnel from sales,
production, purchasing, and finance. The success of the process depends on
managing the process participants as an integrated unit. However, traditional
organizations use a functional organization chart and measurement system to
manage employees and their activities. The purpose of an organization chart is
to show which people are grouped together and their reporting relationships.
Accounting performance measures, financial control systems, and career paths
designed around the organization chart do not encourage behavior patterns
consistent with cross-functional efforts.
Figure 1 shows a functional organization chart overlaid by a horizontal view
of the actual flow of work and relationships between suppliers and customers
outside the organization. Management does not give explicit recognition on the
chart to the cross-functional relationships, i.e. there is no organizational unit
responsible for this collection of activities and there are not likely to be
important employee and managerial performance measures.
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6,3

198
BPMJ

Figure 1.
A process view of a
functional organization

organizations:
Research & Development Manufacturing Marketing & Sales

New Product Ideas


Needs
Research Marketing
Plant #1
Product Designs Orders
Specifications

(2) conversion/service provision; and


Product Sales
Plant #2

(1) acquisition of resources and payment;


Development

Materials Orders

(3) acquisition of customers and the collection of revenue.


Suppliers Customers
Products Promotions

Source: Adapted from Rummler and Brache (1995) p. 8.

Figure 2 is a generic model of three high-level processes found in almost all


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Resources Basic Concerned


Required Activities Parties

Financial Acquire Investors &


Instruments Financing Creditors

Purchase
Resources
Resource
Acquisition Employees
Goods/Services Process
Resources Hire & Use
Employees

Pay
Vendors
Cash
Facilities
Resources

Build Product/ Conversion


Provide Service Process

Cash
Market/Sell
Goods & Services
Marketing/Sales
& Collection Customers
Process
Receive
Cash

of organizations
A generic process model
Figure 2.
Aligning
business schools

199
BPMJ In addition, the diagram shows component relationships between process
6,3 activities, resources used, and internal/external parties to the processes. Within
each of these processes there may be a myriad sub-processes. In some
instances, a process may be interdisciplinary, such as the resource acquisition
process, or they may correspond closely with a particular function such as
manufacturing or accounting. Most often, primary organizational outputs from
200 processes and management responsibility are not aligned with the functional
disciplines we teach in business schools.
There are four primary considerations in defining a process. First, how
broadly (or narrowly) does one wish to define the outputs of the organization?
Second, how complex and manageable is an identified process (if one is too
complex it may need to be split into two or more processes)? Third, how
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different are the information requirements for a group of activities that might
constitute a process (for example, human and capital resource acquisition
processes are generally separated for this reason)? Finally, how significant is
the process to organizational performance, that is, does it need close
monitoring? Over time, some processes may be combined while others may be
explicitly recognized.
Figure 3 shows an organization chart for a four-process organization. The
resource acquisition process is shown as two processes because of significantly
different skill and information requirements between physical and human
resource activities. Examples are given of functional skills/sub-processes
required for each process. Note that fewer cross-functional activities are
involved with human resources than for the conversion process.
As in business, business schools focused their efforts on education within a
department or course (the individual tasks) instead of on the few basic outputs
of most business organizations (and business schools). Consequently, business
education has not provided a broad, integrating, or realistic experience in the
business curriculum and the organization structure of business schools does
not support efforts to meet the demands of modern business organizations
(Harvard Business Review, 1992). These problems may be overcome by
recognizing two primary processes within a business school:
(1) the traditional process to produce graduates with specialized, functional
training; and
(2) a process to teach process and the interdependencies of organizational
functions before students undertake advanced coursework in their
chosen discipline.
The second objective may be accomplished by creating multidisciplinary
teams, separate from functional departments, to deliver core business
education that describes important cross-functional business processes.

Challenges to change in higher education


Porter (1993), applying a strict definition of process reengineering, argues that
BPR will never be applied to higher education in the foreseeable future and
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CEO

Process Owner Process Owner Process Owner Process Owner


Capital Resources Acquisition Human Resources Acquisition Conversion/Service Delivery Marketing/Sales/Collection

Relating to Managing Evaluating Recruiting Training Paying Purchasing Producing Paying Communica- Selling Collecting
Shareholders Financial Project Employees Vendors ting with Cash
and Resources Proposals Customers
Creditors

Functional Skills/Sub-Processes Functional Skills/Sub-Processes Functional Skills/Sub-Processes Functional Skills/Sub-Processes


♦Capital Budgeting ♦Manpower Planning ♦Production Planning ♦Volume Planning & Pricing
♦Cash Planning ♦Budgeting ♦Manpower Planning ♦Budgeting
♦Investment Management ♦Recruiting/Selection ♦Budgeting ♦Manpower Planning
♦Cash Flow Management ♦Training ♦Cost Accounting ♦Advertising
♦Fixed Asset Accounting ♦Employee Relations ♦Production Scheduling ♦Sales Management
♦ROI Analysis ♦Compensation Administration ♦Engineering ♦Shipping/Delivery Tracking
♦Project Audits ♦Payroll Accounting ♦Inventory Control ♦Sales Mix/Revenue Analysis
♦Financial Reporting ♦Performance Appraisal ♦Accounts Payable ♦Customer Relations/Credit
♦Reporting ♦Production Reporting ♦Reporting

A process-based
organization chart
Figure 3.
Aligning
business schools

201
BPMJ further states that it should not be applied. His argument for this position is
6,3 that it will not occur because no one wants fundamental changes in teaching
and research, and administrative process redesign in higher education should
not be attempted because there is no demonstrated need, benefit, or support for
such an effort. Olson (1993) counters that years of reduced budgets, increased
costs, and demands for new and improved services coupled with advances in
202 technology require that we do things differently.
The AACSB Faculty Leadership Task Force Report (1996) identified a
number of problems facing business schools and faculty leadership that
support the need for significant changes during the coming years. These
problems are summarized by a fundamental lack of alignment between faculty
skills with the rapidly changing needs of business. This condition presents
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significant barriers to implementing a process-based business curriculum and


organization.
During the last two decades, business practice has changed dramatically (for
example, just-in-time (JIT), total quality management (TQM), reengineering,
customer satisfaction, complete competence, cycle-time reduction, flat
organizations, workforce diversity, and so forth). While business school and
faculty competencies also have advanced, the gap between practice and
academic teaching and research has widened (AACSB Faculty Leadership Task
Force Report, 1996). The reasons for this widening gap, according to the report,
include:
(1) lack of interaction between faculty and business;
(2) changing technologies;
(3) delays in incorporating modern business practices in textbooks and
other teaching materials;
(4) an aging, change-resistant faculty; and
(5) a fundamental mismatch between faculty performance measures and
objectives of colleges of business to produce graduates attractive to
employers and trained to solve practical business problems.

An outline of a process-centered business curriculum


The basic components of our concept of a process-centered undergraduate
business curriculum consist of courses concerned with business strategy, core
business processes, and discipline-specific courses[1]. It should be noted that
advanced courses required for a major in a specific business discipline are not
necessarily changed by the business process approach. After the process-
centered business core courses, these specific discipline or major courses
(marketing, management, accounting, finance, operations management, and so
forth) can be taught in a traditional approach or through an integrated
approach; for example, Brigham Young University's accounting curriculum.
The following lists provide topical outlines for four process-oriented courses
designed to replace the traditional business core curriculum, otherwise known
as the common body of knowledge.
Topical outline for an acquisition of capital resources process course: Aligning
Financial economic theory. business schools
Short-term financial planning and management.
Long-term financial planning and management.
Financial markets.
Risk and return. 203
Cost of capital.
Valuation of future cash flows:
Developing pro-forma cash flow budgets.
Net present value analysis.
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Internal rate of return.


Capital budgeting.
Mergers and acquisitions.
Fixed asset accounting.
Long-term liability accounting.
Tax effects and implications.
Strategic location decisions:
Environmental issues.
Legal issues.
International issues.
Logistical issues.
Economy of scale issues.
Topical outline for a human resources acquisition process course:
Macro/micro aspects of labor markets.
Wage structures.
Employment law.
Manpower planning.
Hiring.
Training.
Organizing.
Compensation.
Tax issues in compensation.
HR/payroll systems.
Payroll accounting.
Evaluating productivity and behavior.
Terminating/retiring employees.
BPMJ Topical outline for a conversion/service process course:
6,3 Managing the conversion/service process.
Research and development of new products.
Economics of industrial organizations.
Market research:
204 Customer satisfaction.
Demand forecasting.
Materials management.
Just-in-time systems.
Production planning and scheduling.
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Cost-volume-profit analysis.
Budgeting.
Product costing.
Inventory accounting.
Total quality management.
Statistical process control.
Production/service information systems.
Transportation and distribution.
Process management.
Ethical issues.
Environmental issues.

Topical outline for a sales/collection/customer service process course:


Concepts in supply/demand.
Market elasticity.
Market behavior/competition.
Strategic planning for marketing products.
Analyzing markets and consumer behavior.
Analyzing competitors.
Sales forecasting and budgeting.
Pricing/pricing strategy.
Advertising programs.
Sales performance monitoring.
Marketing/sales information systems.
Revenue accounting.
Customer service.
These courses are linked through a series of business cases which are used in Aligning
each of the process courses. By doing this, the students are able to examine the business schools
business processes within different types of companies and in different
situations. For example, students examine manufacturing and service
companies which are in growth and mature stages. The material for the courses
is taught within the framework of the business process and its relation to a
``real-world'' situation. These four courses represent the basic processes found 205
in most organizations and serve to link the contributions of each business
discipline in achieving the broad business objectives of acquiring resources,
converting them into products and services, and selling to customers.
The list below provides a topical outline for a course about the performance
measurement and management process. This course is concerned with how
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processes interface to achieve the strategy of an organization. Although some


might argue that many of these topics should be incorporated into the other
business process courses, we recommend that a separate course is necessary for
two reasons. First, shareholders in publicly-traded companies represent an
important group of customers that are not considered in the other business
processes. Second, performance measurement and management can be a
complex undertaking that requires a variety of measures from many sources to
be evaluated and balanced in order to achieve strategy. An alternative
arrangement to this course is to consider internal performance measurement
issues in the process courses. This would involve taking much of the material
commonly found in the cost/managerial portion of principles of accounting and
parceling it out mainly to the course concerned with the conversion process.
External financial reporting issues could then be addressed in a separate course.

Topical outline for an organizational performance measurement and


management course:
Customer satisfaction.
Process measurement and performance standards.
Statistical process control.
Quality assurance/quality control.
Concepts in efficiency and effectiveness.
Performance models.
Budgets.
Financial reports and audits:
Financial ratio analysis.
Needs of external stakeholders.
Balanced scorecard reporting.
Behavioral aspects of performance measurement.
Integrating financial and process measures.
Performance management ± linking measures to goals and strategies.
BPMJ Courses in business strategy should provide a cornerstone, prior to the
6,3 business process courses, and a capstone experience at the end of a student's
education, following the major discipline courses. One common approach to
teaching strategy, which fits well with the process-based curriculum, is the
contingency perspective. This view holds that strategy is effectively
determined through a process of ``fitting'' environmental factors (competition,
206 consumer behavior, government regulations, and so forth) with organizational
capabilities, largely determined by the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of
business processes. A strategy course presented from this point of view
permits discussion of how elements (subprocesses) of business processes,
considered in light of contextual factors, impact on the development of
strategy.
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Benefits of the process approach for improved performance


There are at least three categories of benefits of adopting the process approach
for business education. The first group is related to the curriculum
development process. The process orientation provides a basis for formulating
and implementing a viable strategy for the business curriculum. Process is a
vehicle for truly cross-functional thinking. Faculty members who are trained in
specialized fields tend to interpret learning objectives from the perspective of
their specialty. The process view helps overcome this limitation. It also
provides a framework for long-term efforts to develop the curriculum and
undertake other departmental and college-wide partnerships with
organizations designed to improve performance. This approach can also help
faculty define what is to be accomplished by a business program, traditional
functional specialists or graduates with better understanding of cross-
functional activities. A process-based curriculum also may serve to attract
students and employers and provide a source of competitive advantage for an
institution's business programs.
The second group of benefits is derived from an effective, efficient
educational process. The process approach delivers to students an integrated
understanding of how businesses function from an organizational instead of a
functional perspective. This is accomplished by presenting the study of
business as a series of integrated activities instead of largely independent
functions. The process courses help identify and eliminate undesirable
redundancies in the coverage of topical material because the process courses
force communication and cooperation between faculty of different disciplines
when the courses are developed. For example, chapters concerned with
financial statement ratios can be found in accounting, finance, and marketing
textbooks. Discussions of pricing and cost-volume-profit analysis are found in
accounting and marketing texts.
Finally, there are organizational benefits to this approach. Process requires
that ownership of these courses be shifted from the faculty at large to
interdisciplinary process teams. Here, functional concerns and opportunities
for delivery of business education services are expressed in the context of
business process. This arrangement fosters the cross-functional cooperation Aligning
among faculty that is already occurring in business to bring about dramatic business schools
improvements in performance. Benefits to business schools of interdisciplinary
efforts include faculty becoming involved in teaching outside their traditional
discipline and acquiring multidisciplinary capabilities[2]. As a result these
individuals become more aware of personal benefits of change. They have the
opportunity to increase their value to their institution and other prospective 207
employers. Development of broad business faculty is consistent with the efforts
of many PhD programs to improve customer satisfaction (AACSB, 1996).
Figure 4 illustrates three dimensions of a process managed core business
curriculum. The core curricula of most business schools focus primarily on
only two dimensions, functional knowledge and skills. This view is not
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consistent with cross-functional, process-managed organizations (Harvard


Business Review, 1992). The functional dimension is retained in this model
because it is so ingrained in organizations of all types that it seems unrealistic
to eliminate it, and because business continues to need individuals with
specialized training (Rummler and Brache, 1995). This curriculum structure
includes interdisciplinary teams to teach process courses in addition to
function-based faculty to deliver discipline-specific courses needed for a major
area of study.
Clear customer (process)-supplier (functions) relationships and priorities for
delivering business education are established by the process model.
Encouraged to address the needs of customer-employers in structuring

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Integrative Theme -
Business Processes
(Use one or more process
integrators such as business
strategy, information systems,
communications technology,
process technology, change
management, business Figure 4.
environment, or the like The three dimensions of
business education
BPMJ business education programs, opportunities arise to revise the faculty reward
6,3 system to make it more congruent with the college. New measures of faculty
performance are suggested such as participation in and publication of
interdisciplinary and practical research projects, development of alliances with
businesses, and participation in faculty internship programs.
Faculty performance evaluation systems must be able to recognize and
208 reward faculty who become involved in time-consuming activities that help to
provide a higher quality educational experience for students and benefit the
institution. Examples of these activities include course and curriculum
development, more written and oral communications assignments, and student
recruitment and retention efforts. In addition, faculty reward systems need to
consider group as well as individual measures of teaching/learning
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performance because business education is largely a cooperative, not an


individual, effort.

Problems and solutions to achieve a business process-oriented


undergraduate core curriculum
There are a number of obstacles to implementing a business process approach
to the undergraduate business curriculum, but the obstacles can be overcome.
Two principal problems are faculty resistance to change and the financial costs
of change. Other problems include a culture and reward system that does not
support innovation or customer service in the delivery of business education, a
lack of teaching materials to support a process perspective, and a number of
administrative issues. Solutions to the problems may be found in strong
academic leaders (deans and department chairs) and a critical mass of faculty
from different disciplines willing to invest their time to develop and deliver an
integrated core business curriculum.
Faculty resistance to change is the foremost obstacle to changing the
undergraduate curriculum. Faculty view courses as ends in themselves rather
than means to an end because they serve a diverse student population and
support multiple programs. Courses also tend to take on characteristics of
``personal property'' because they exist in isolation with only a few faculty
directly involved. Many faculty believe that the content and delivery of basic
business education should not be altered, including changing teaching
schedules from other than two or three days per week for 50 or 75 minutes. The
solution to these problems may be found in creating a separate organizational
unit, reporting to the dean, responsible for the undergraduate core business
curriculum. This is similar to the approach taken by the University of Denver
to integrate the MBA program.
Some faculty are vehemently opposed to teaching, or having others teach,
outside their area of expertise or to undergoing retraining. However, instructors
in junior/community colleges frequently are not terminally qualified but
regularly teach courses in multiple disciplines for which students receive credit
at four-year institutions of higher learning. We suggest that colleges of
business should expect at least a portion of their faculty to possess the same
broad-based understanding of basic business that faculties (and labor markets) Aligning
expect of our students. This view is consistent with the position reported in business schools
AACSB Newsline (AACSB, 1996) that ``if faculty members don't know how to
think about business as integrated relationships, then students won't learn how
to, either''. Not all faculty need to teach the business core[2].
Converting the undergraduate business core curriculum to a process
perspective can be expensive. Some of the costs that may be encountered 209
include:
(1) summer support to plan the curriculum;
(2) release time for faculty to prepare in new areas of teaching and to pilot
test process courses;
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(3) faculty training in new teaching methods and techniques; and


(4) ongoing costs of additional faculty if courses are team taught or if
smaller class sizes are desired.
Some of these costs may be reduced if faculty workload assignments are
weighted more heavily toward teaching.
The University of Idaho, which implemented an undergraduate integrated
core curriculum encountered many of these problems. There were high up-front
costs in terms of time to the faculty members involved. They were able to
overcome many of these problems by allowing some course releases and
rewarding faculty for their efforts with additional summer support. The initial
implementation entails the highest cost; however, these costs decrease over
time as the faculty learn their new roles and expectations are adjusted.
A third problem is the faculty reward system. The traditional faculty reward
system is fundamentally misaligned with customers of business schools (e.g.
employers and students). Correctly aligned incentives for faculty, departments,
colleges, and their customers promote behavior congruent with institutional
objectives (to serve customers). Business departments and colleges of business
are evaluated based on criteria such as quality of relations with alumni and
employers, success of fund raising efforts, and placement of graduates, to name a
few. Business faculties are primarily concerned with student evaluations of
teaching and publication output. However, student evaluations of teaching
address only the quality of the process, not the product (output) (Abrami et al.,
1990). In addition, the greatest rewards for publications are often those appearing
in specialized academic journals not widely read in the business community.
Customers of business education programs complain that new managers are
not being trained broadly and rigorously enough for the high technology, high
risk international marketplace and that much of the research coming from
business schools lacks relevance to real business problems (AACSB, 1996).
There are few incentives for faculty to engage in activities outside traditional
academic research that is frequently the most important criterion for tenure
and promotion decisions and pay increases. New faculty with recent business
experience are often well-suited for this undertaking. However, they are
BPMJ discouraged from participating because their research may suffer.
6,3 Administrative support, monetary incentives, release time, and new job
descriptions that include a significant curriculum development component are
effective ways to overcome this obstacle.
There are limited teaching materials to provide basic business education
consistent with a process view. It is possible to use traditional textbooks by
210 selecting chapters or portions of chapters to fit the process model. Another
recent innovation is the ability to obtain customized textbooks from publishers
who are willing to take chapters from various different textbooks to form a
customized text. Instructors must have a good understanding of business
process concepts in order to effectively link topics from different textbooks, so
students learn business as a series of integrated functional efforts. We have
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discussed development of process-based teaching materials with some major


publishers, and we are cautiously optimistic that some will be available in the
next few years.
Finally, there are some administrative issues concerning faculty and
students in integrated courses that involve multiple faculty participants. These
problems include measurement of teaching loads, responsibility for student
evaluations, transfer credits into and out of the college, service needs to other
colleges within the university, the perception and reception of a new paradigm
outside the university, and others as yet unidentified.

Conclusions: why business schools must adopt the process view


We must adopt a process view in business education for at least three reasons.
The first reason is because it reflects what business is doing. Just as business
schools patterned themselves after business organizations and practices in the
past, they should now look to evolving methods and structures designed to
meet the challenges faced by today's businesses. There are many documented
examples of organizations, including American Standard, Ford, Xerox, GTE,
Chrysler, Shell Chemical, and Taco Bell, that have turned to process
management techniques to improve organizational performance. Garvin (1995)
provides an excellent report on the benefits, and difficulties, of the process
perspective in a discussion with senior executives from four diverse industries
(Xerox, USAA, SmithKline Beecham, and Pepsi) facing a wide range of
competitive challenges. The observations by these executives about processes
and process management are very similar including the value of this approach
to achieve congruence among strategic direction, organizational design, staff
capabilities, and the processes used to ensure that people work together to meet
company goals.
Business schools face similar challenges to encourage faculty to work
together to provide business education that is responsive to the demands of
their customers. Business faculties expect their graduates to possess a broad-
based understanding of business and to be able to succeed in twenty-first
century organizations. It is now time for faculties of business schools to have
extensive knowledge about reengineered organizations and to apply what is
being taught. The effort is already under way. Geiger and Dangerfield (1997) Aligning
identified ten schools of business that have, or are developing, ``reengineered'' business schools
undergraduate programs[3,4].
Second, developments in modern information technology (IT) demand that
process management concepts be implemented, so businesses (and business
schools) can reap the benefits of efficiency, flexibility, and customer
responsiveness. These characteristics are commonly associated with ``flat'' 211
organizations. Flat organizations have few levels, are organized around
customers or processes instead of departments or functions, and their
employees know the business, think for the whole firm, and act like owners
when they serve the customer. Flat organizations require employees to possess
broad business skills in addition to technical competence.
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True process management and flattening of the organizational hierarchy was


not possible until the past decade because old IT could only support the
command-and-control structure embodied in the traditional organization chart.
The goals, outputs, and performance of organizations are not focused on what
occurs in a particular department. However, stand-alone information systems
were developed to support information requirements and monitor performance
on a departmental or functional basis. This situation contributed to
organizational conflicts over implementation of strategy and allocation of
resources. New IT permits simultaneous access to information from diverse
locations and by different functional groups. Rather than regarding the activities
such as producing accounting reports, developing marketing plans, or
scheduling the production operation as discreet outputs, the information system
can be used to view each of these efforts as merely tasks that contribute to
interdisciplinary processes designed to satisfy a customer and generate a profit.
Finally, the process management approach provides the opportunity for
business managers, faculty, and students to understand the variables that
impact on organizational and individual performance. A lack of perspective on
what factors impact performance is a significant gap in business education and
on the management of business schools. Most business education programs
include a capstone policy course intended to provide an integrative view of the
functions within a business. However, this is frequently a case of too little, too
late. For business faculty, a reward system based on student evaluations of
teaching and publication output ignores the basic responsibilities of business
schools to their student and employer customers. The process perspective
needs to be introduced early in the business curriculum and within the business
faculty to ensure that process is indeed paramount to function in business
education as it is in business.
Notes
1. Several schools have integrated MBA programs (for example, the University of Tennessee,
Babson College, and the University of Denver). The University of Tennessee integrates
accounting, finance, marketing, operations, and human resources in the context of team-
oriented, real-world crises and solutions. Schlesinger (1996) describes the MBA program at
Babson. Accounting, marketing, finance, organizational effectiveness, and microeconomics
BPMJ are integrated via team teaching or by reference to topics covered by other faculty
members. The University of Denver integrated its MBA program in part by having
6,3 students take part in real-time, profit-oriented business experiments outside the classroom.
The integrative efforts included restructuring the college of business around customers
instead of functions.
2. This may be of particular benefit to larger colleges and programs in which there are many
faculty in a particular discipline and they are less likely to teach outside their area of
212 training. In addition, faculty from other disciplines would interact more and be more likely
to do multidisciplinary research. However, highly specialized faculty are often not
qualified to build and teach in interdisciplinary programs.
3. The University of Idaho, and Ft Lewis College (Colorado) have committed to large
integrated classes of ten or more credits that teach multiple elements of the disciplines to
all juniors. The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, does the same thing but only for
honors students. The University of Colorado at Boulder, integrates introductions to
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accounting, finance, management, marketing, and information systems in two six-hour


courses. Northern Illinois University offers a nine-hour, junior-level management/
marketing/finance/operations management course. Pennsylvania State University,
Brigham Young University, and the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) are using
coordinating mechanisms and private sector influences to integrate material across
disciplines. The University of Central Florida relies on cases to link standard three- and
four-credit introductory business courses. Worcester Polytechnic Institute employs three
major writing projects, worth about 21 semester hours, to create the equivalent of an
integrated curriculum experience. There was no mention of the approach taken by Pacific
Lutheran University.
4. Efforts to integrate the core business curricula are in progress at Western Carolina
University (WCU), Fairfield University, Valparaiso University, and the University of
Virginia. WCU structured a single, three-semester course meeting six hours per week,
producing a total of 18 semester hours of credit. This course relies on experiential learning
techniques, team-based learning, and is team taught (see Carland et al., 1997). Fairfield
University integrates business policies, organizational behavior, finance, marketing,
production operations, and international business into three four-hour courses. In addition,
they added an information systems component for this team-oriented, interdisciplinary,
experiential, project-driven program. Valparaiso University integrates accounting, finance,
management and organizational behavior, marketing, management information systems, and
qualitative aspects of production operations management into a one-semester, 12-hour course.
The course is team taught by five professors, at least two of whom are present at all times.
The McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, is using a block scheduling
approach to core business courses. Students register for a schedule of classes instead of
single courses. The purpose of this approach is to foster cooperation and teamwork between
functional areas through coordinated scheduling, sequencing, and syllabuses.

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