Towards Educating Boundary Spanning Professionals across BPM and BI Domains

In today’s business environments organizations deal with complex problems that require holistic solutions originating from both business and technical domains. Such initiatives require business professionals that have a deeper understanding of the holistic nature of the problems, and can offer integrated solutions that leverage practices from various domains. In order to equip professionals with a cross-disciplinary skill set, we turn our attention to their education. In this paper we aim to open a conversation between both Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) communities of educators and contribute towards: 1) setting up a foundation for integration of domain-specific practices, and 2) suggesting learning approaches that facilitate cross-disciplinary education. Specifically, we discuss how boundary objects can facilitate the integration of BPM and BI domain-specific knowledge, and assist in educating the future boundary-spanning professionals. We highlight opportunities for learning at a deeper level achieved by cross-disciplinary education and illustrate the approach with an example of an integrated learning activity.