The "e" has been dropped from courses, curriculums, concentra-tions and research centers in business schools across the land. But now the pendulum has swung back too far. Although many professors were relieved that they did not create e-anything or hire high-priced professors with e-credentials, these "I told you so" profs continue to teach outdated information systems courses aimed at yesterday's business problems. There is, however, new work to be done, and the business world needs properly trained graduates that can put the Internet to real business use in finding desperately needed new sources of productivity-a la GE's company-wide Digitization Initiative.

IBM's Ambuj Goyal summarizes the requirements in a Line56 article, Achieving Automation, "Savvy IT companies are beginning to take a fresh approach to managing their systems environment. No longer are they looking at their IT systems as discrete functions, but rather as parts of broader business processes. They are shifting their focus to a higher level and asking questions, such as 'How do we reduce the time and effort it takes to step through an order transaction?' and 'How can we more cost-effectively handle customer inquiries?' They find that the answer to these questions almost always involves interactions between multiple systems. Doing so requires a top-down and bottom-up view of business processes, as well as the right software tools to integrate, analyze and transform them. The payoff of business process management is in-creased business efficiency. The reality, however, is that exchanging data within a company and with business partners and customers is not easy. A survey conducted by IBM of 33,000 companies around the globe found that only five percent of businesses were at this stage of e-business integration. The key stumbling block was integrating work processes-such as supply chain, procurement and customer relations-across disparate computing platforms, applications and operating systems." This is the challenge M.B.A. graduates will face as they enter to-day's workforce-the business process management (BPM) challenge.

While e-commerce and e-business monikers may have been M.B.A. marketing ploys, the real "e" is e-process. BPM, along with hands-on automated tools and live case studies, should be integrated into the core curriculum, including courses on operations management, managerial accounting, marketing and production management. In much the same way that SAP provided case studies and software to business schools that wanted to teach their students hands-on skills using ERP systems, it's now time to do the same with BPM software.
Business process management and Web services composition courses using integrated development environments should replace yes-terday's systems analysis, design, programming and database courses in the more specialized M.I.S. and C.I.S. programs. Enough already
-companies should no longer build in-house systems. They buy and configure functional application packages like ERP, SCM and CRM. But with the business process superseding the application as the object of auto-mation, students need to learn about the BPMS as well as the traditional DBMS. They need hands-on experience with BPQL as much as they ever needed SQL skills. The future is not about systems development; it's about business process manufacturing and manipulation, where the object of an information system is end-to-end business processes.

Companies need business process analysts and engineers, not systems analysts and programmers. Now is the time for business schools to provide their graduates with the business process management knowledge and hands-on skills needed in the process-managed enterprise, the company of the future. The future will be owned by those who don't just improve processes, but who create methodologies and systems that automate their creation to achieve create competitive advantage. Professors, please teach your students to speak BPML, the language of process. Vendors, please give them the tools they need.

Excerpts from Business Process Management: The Third Wave, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, ISBN 0-929652-33-9 Off-press November 2002, Meghan-Kiffer Press