“Students are in a mode where they’re often just soaking up new ideas,
and they’ll feed back to us things that we wouldn’t have thought about.”
—Dick Dietrich, Academic Director, Center for Business Performance Management at OSU
the Center for Business Performance
Management have access to Hyperion
Interactive Reporting – System 9 (for
business intelligence reports and queries
and for building dashboards), and they’re
just beginning to explore the addition of
Hyperion Strategic Finance. Familiarity
with these applications has far-reaching
benefits—for the university, for students,
and for the enterprises that will eventually employ those students.
“If the students on campus learn
how to use tools from Hyperion or
other vendors that will help them in
solving business problems effectively,
they get jobs in corporations and other
organizations after they graduate, and
they come in and say, ‘Why don’t you
use this tool? This would make things
a lot easier,’” says Dietrich, the center’s
academic director. “That’s often the case
of change with using new and better
technologies and management techniques in business,” he adds. “You get
the people who get converted, and they
convert others.”
PREPARING STUDENTS
In addition to spreading the good word
about the benefits of BPM, the center can
also gain insight, through research and
interaction, about how BPM is already
being adopted by organizations. Gaining
that knowledge helps the center’s faculty
better prepare their students for the
workplace, and it also highlights ways
that organizations collaborating with the
center might improve their operations.
“If we find, for example, that one
industry is a very sophisticated user of
BPM techniques already and another
industry is not, what creates the difference? Is that difference something that
can be rectified by knowledge? Or is
that something that’s somehow more
structural in nature that won’t change
much?” says Dietrich, noting that
students are ideally suited to pursue
answers to those questions. “Students
are in a mode where they’re often just
soaking up new ideas, and they’ll feed
back to us things that we wouldn’t have
thought about,” he adds. “That’s part of
being in a learning organization.”
As much as Fisher College students
might be educating their educators in
this way, they’re also helping themselves
secure employment.
“We were hearing consistently from
our customers that one of their challenges
was finding graduates knowledgeable
about BI and BPM,” says Oracle’s Conway.
“So, it seemed like if students took this
as a course of study or had classes and
exposure to business intelligence technologies and some of the concepts that
Hyperion was promoting, it would make
>>SNAPSHOT
Center for Business Performance Management at Ohio
State University’s Fisher College
of Business
fishermba.osu.edu/mba/
centers_of_excellence/
Location: Columbus, Ohio
them very attractive in the marketplace.”
It’s worked for Xiao Sun. Following
the summer internship at GE, Sun went
on to win the center’s honors summer
essay contest, which challenged students
enrolled in the Fisher College of Business
to explore what they’d learned about
the value of BPM in the course of their
summer internships. Sun also completed
a yearlong research project focusing on
the venture capital industry, and he was
one of four students on Fisher’s team at
the University of Southern California’s
international business case competition,
where he took third place. Last summer,
he had another internship—at JP
Morgan—and this summer, after graduation, he’ll return there as an analyst.
“Especially in the corporate setting,
where cost controls and Sarbanes-Oxley
are affecting things, it’s really important
knowing a BPM system that would help
out with those processes,” says Sun.
“It’s a very marketable skill.”
BPM IN THE WORKPLACE
As for the center’s future, in the short
term it’s finalizing a global survey
on the current level of performance
management tools used by senior
corporate officers—the results of which
will be analyzed by scholars and research
associates at Fisher, the Cranfield
University School of Management, and
Peking University. The center will also
further increase integration of BPM
into Fisher’s curriculum and help other
business schools do the same. It will
continue to actively recruit members
of the external business community
for its advisory board, and to question
industry leaders about how they use
performance management techniques in
their organizations and why they think it
makes a difference.
Such exchanges should educate both
faculty and students, and they could lead
to more internship and recruiting relationships—which in turn will provide an
opportunity for tomorrow’s executives to
familiarize their new companies with the
BPM tools they’ve come to value.
“I think that’s the potential for both
Oracle and Oracle’s customers: that, as
people come off of our campus and other
campuses knowing how to use these
tools well, it will help the companies that
employ them and it will help diffuse the
technology,” concludes Dietrich. “That’s
just the kind of symbiotic relationship
that I think we want to have between a
major technology vendor like Oracle, the
customers of Oracle, the employers of
our students, and us.” <>
BLAIR CAMPBELL is a San Francisco–based freelance
writer and a contributing editor for Profit.
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