Developing Business Process Management Capabilities of Undergraduate IT Students

In recent years, Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as an effective management strategy and an efficient technological solution for managing cross-functional business processes. Software industry is striving to integrate more and more functionalities in their BPM products. For this, the industry needs professionals who are equipped with BPM capabilities. However, lack of appropriate BPM skilled professionals in the field is a commonly reported problem. Keeping in view the importance of BPM knowledge & skills, a course of BPM is offered to IT undergraduate students to promote their process management capabilities. This longitudinal study, spread over fours semesters, has found that BPM knowledge and skills have strong connections with the IT curriculum and offering of BPM course to undergraduate students can strengthen their BPM capabilities. However, keeping in view the rapidly evolving nature of BPM field and associated technologies, the study identifies the need of standardized curriculum guidelines, to be developed in collaboration with academia and industry, to help the academic institutions to prepare students according to the needs of the employment market. It is believed the recommendations and the lessons learnt in this study may be useful for those who are seeking to strengthen their students’ business process capabilities.