IST-Africa 2014 Conference Proceedings Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham (Eds) IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-905824-43-4
Uncovering the Competency Gap of Students Employed in Business Process Analyst Roles – An Employer Perspective Tendai C. CHAKABUDA, Lisa F. SEYMOUR, Francois I. VAN DER MERWE Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch, 7700, South Africa Tel: +27 216504259, Email:
[email protected] Abstract: As organisations become more process oriented, there has been a significant increase in the demand for graduates and professionals with Business Process Management (BPM) expertise. Whilst there is an increase in BPM training and university related courses to try and address the demand for BPM expertise it has remained a constant challenge for organisations to acquire the appropriate skill set. Little research has been conducted to measure the extent to which graduates meet employer requirements within this field. The aim of this paper is assess the competency gaps of IS students employed in the emerging business process analyst role using the framework for business process analyst competencies as developed by Sonteya and Seymour. We find that competency gaps do exist, the greatest of which were organisation knowledge and the business process orchestration competency. Additionally, the study found that employers consider the business interpersonal competency as the most important for a business process analyst role. Keywords: Business Analyst, Business Process Management, Enterprise System Education, Competencies, ICT Skills, Graduates.
1. Introduction Business Process Management (BPM) has gained momentum over the past years. As organisations become more process oriented, there has been a significant increase in the demand for graduates and professionals with BPM expertise [4]. Despite the rise in demand for BPM expertise as well as BPM related courses in academia; it has remained a constant challenge for organisations to acquire the appropriate skill set and graduates are still not adequately equipped with sound process management skills [3], [15]. A general lack of IT skills, such as business analysts and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) consultants, is also resulting in organisations across Africa struggling to implement and effectively use business software and enterprise systems [14]. Research shows that University IS curricula as a whole is not properly aligned with industry needs due to the ever changing IT landscape and that IS courses are derived from an academic and theoretical view [14]. The purpose of this paper is to examine the skills gap between ICT graduate competencies and industry expectations as it relates to the Business Process Analyst (BPA) role within South Africa. The authors investigated the BPA competencies employers consider relevant and important, the competency levels received from graduates and the satisfaction level of employers with graduate BPA competencies.
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2. Competency Framework According to Hoffman [10] the term competency can be understood as it relates to an individual’s performance in order for the competency to be performed, observed, and assessed. A competency can also be viewed as a minimum acceptable level of performance required for a particular job. Individuals were seen as competent when they reached a particular level set by their organisation. Competency has also referred to the underlying attributes of a person such as their knowledge, skills or abilities [10]. Whilst the use of these definitions focus on the required inputs of individuals in order for them to produce competent performances another view argues that the definition take into account conceptual competencies (cognitive, knowledge and understanding of the job) and operational competencies (functional competencies which are skills an individual applies on their job) [11]. Three different aspects of competence can be considered; cognitive (the way an individual thinks), emotional (self-management competencies such as emotional selfcontrol) and social competencies (relationship management competencies) [5]. Competencies can further be split into hard skills (technical skills and knowledge) and soft skills (behavioural skills of how an individual responds to various situations). Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a common standard for evaluating an individual’s competency level within a particular job or profession and can be applied to evaluate competency levels in a subject area such as BPM skills [17]. The Business Process Analyst is defined as a “mid-level person who deals with tactical, more day-to-day aspects of discovering, validating, documenting and communicating business process knowledge’’[2]. The BPA is seen as an integral link between the business and IT and performs a dual role as the face of IT to the business and as the business face to IT, they therefore require a mix of skills and competencies to be effective [1]. BPM positions and roles are still very vague, process skills and associated positions vary according to different organizations and may depend on whether the organization sees the BPA as being primarily a business skill or IT skill [1]. There have been several studies done to understand BPM positions and the competencies required for the BPA role. The framework for Business Process Analysis Competencies developed by Sonteya and Seymour [16] reflects the core set of skills for a business process analyst used in this study and were used to measure the extent to which graduates meet employer requirements.
Figure 1: Framework for Business Process Analysis Competencies [16]
The fundamental skills a BPA will need include; client experience thinking skills (to always have the end user in mind), a holistic overview business process thinking (the ability Copyright © 2014 The authors www.IST-Africa.org/Conference2014
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to understand how one change in a process will impact another process) as well as mathematical and statistical competencies when analysing performance metrics or using process improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma and Lean [16]. The BPA needs to be able to interact with various stakeholders in the organisation and therefore business interpersonal competencies are important as the BPA must be able to communicate effectively with users. It is important for the BPA to know and understand the organisation objectives, goals and processes as well as how they all impact and feed into each other [14]. This will enable the BPA to design solutions that are aligned with organisation objectives and goals. The BPA is the custodian or gatekeeper of BPM initiatives and activities thus they are the main champion of BPM drivers, as such the business process orchestration competency is the most important function of a BPA [16]. The BPA must communicate the benefits of BPM to stakeholders so as to ensure they get buy in into BPM initiatives [14]. The BPA also requires Technical competencies such as the ability to understand how SOA and ERPs affect organisations and how these support business processes in terms of integration [16].
3. BPM university curricula and the skills gap BPM is an emerging discipline and process management courses are still a new concept in University curricula [15]. The lack of common understanding on BPM amongst practitioners and researchers provides a hindrance to the establishment of BPM curricula in Higher Education [3]. Whilst there is a growing emphasis on BPM modules in Universities shortcomings still exist in curricula ranging from inadequate coverage of BPM related competencies to a heavy lenience towards the BPM technical stream [12]. There have been questions on whether BPM education should be more business or technological based. BPM is an interdisciplinary field not only covering Information systems but management practices and can be found in engineering, IS and business schools [3]. Business schools focus on the strategic side of BPM, engineering schools focus on the optimization of the Business processes and the information systems schools focus on the systems and technologies supporting BPM. This poses a challenge to a student enrolled in a business or engineering or IS degree as they will not get a holistic view of how BPM fits together [3]. Despite this rise of BPM related courses in academia; it has remained a constant challenge for organisations to acquire the appropriate skill set and graduates are still not adequately equipped with sound process management skills [15]. Several studies have been done in South Africa to determine the extent to which ICT graduates are work ready. One notable study done by Accenture in 2008 indicated a demand for graduates who possess IS skills in process management, configuration management and change management. Soft skills such as communication, people management skills and presentation skills were lacking in graduates and these skills represent a baseline of competencies that employers seek, as they are transferrable across workplaces [6], [9]. Soft skills are seen to be as important as domain specific knowledge and the ability to keep up with the rapid advances in science and technology depends not only on domain specific knowledge but also on soft skills [2]. Higher education institutions are seen to be not aligned with the expectations of employers with regards to the most important skills and attributes for the BPA and it is necessary to determine the extent of misalignment or the competency gap and also how this can be minimised [9].
4. Research Objectives The goal of this paper is to examine the competencies associated with the business process analyst role to determine the skills gap between ICT graduate competencies and industry expectations. Hence this research was done with an aim to: Copyright © 2014 The authors www.IST-Africa.org/Conference2014
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Investigate the BPA competencies employers consider relevant and important for a business process analyst. Investigate the competency level(s) employers require graduates to have and the level(s) they are actually getting from graduates Investigate the satisfaction level of employers with graduate BPA competencies Using the framework for Business Process Analysis Competencies developed by Sonteya and Seymour [16] to measure competencies and considering the literature evidence given, we defined our five hypotheses as follows: H1: Interpersonal Competencies are more important than Technical Competencies. H2: There is a competency gap between required competencies and graduate competencies. H3: The competency gap for interpersonal skills is greater than that of technical skills. H4: The smaller the competency gap, the greater the employer satisfaction levels. H5: There is a negative correlation between required level and graduate level competencies.
5. Research Method In order to test our hypotheses the authors followed a quantitative exploratory approach by means of an electronic questionnaire, used in a survey which targeted hiring managers of graduates for BPA roles. The sampling method used was a non-probability sampling design with the snowballing and judgement sample technique. Organisations were identified using data from the University of Cape Town’s Careers office as well as professional websites such as Linked In and Career Junction to identify experts in the business process analysis field in South Africa. A total of 130 surveys were sent out and 56 fully completed responses were received. A limitation of this research method is that one is assuming that industry knows best practices when it comes to business process analyst skills. The instrument measured various employees’ satisfaction with graduate competencies and was divided into 3 sections. Section A required general organisation and graduate information. Section B examined the competencies of business process analysts based on the framework for business process analysis competencies of Sonteya and Seymour [16]. To ensure that the respondents understood what each competency included a definition list of the competencies was provided at the start of Section B. Respondents were required to rate the importance of each competency as well as their satisfaction with the workplace skills of the graduates (and the ability to apply the specific competency) on a 5 point Likert scale. With 1 indicating extremely important, and 5 not important. Respondents then rated the level that they required from graduates entering into a BPA role using Bloom’s Taxonomy, level 0 being "Not needed" to level 6 "Evaluation". A definition list of the Bloom’s Taxonomy was also provided. Respondents were also provided with a free text field to add any additional competencies they felt Business Process Analysts should have. Section C provided a free text field for respondents to add any other information they may have felt relevant for the study. Two methods of validity were applied to this instrument namely face validity and content validity. The data was collected over a period of 1,5 months. An initial screening was conducted to filter out incomplete responses and then the data was assigned numerical values and was uploaded into Statistica for data analysis. The methods used to test hypotheses were: Mann Whitney test for hypothesis H1; Gap analysis for hypotheses H2 and H3; Comparison of means for hypothesis H4; and Spearman’s rank order correlation for hypothesis H5.
6. Results and Discussion The 65 respondents were predominantly from the Finance industry (23), investment management industry (11) and Computers and Information Technology industry (10). The Copyright © 2014 The authors www.IST-Africa.org/Conference2014
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job titles of respondents included Business Analyst (11), Business Process Manager (9), Senior Business Analyst (5), Business Process Analyst (4), Business Process Engineer (4). Graduates employed in Business Process analyst roles typically hold an undergraduate degree (24 responses) or an Honours degree (24 responses). The importance ranking as well as the satisfaction ranking for each competency were analysed both at the individual level as well as a grouping level as per Sonteya and Seymour’s [16] framework for BPA’s (Table1). The ranking was determined by taking the sum of the ratings for that competency and dividing this by the number of respondents. Of the 16 competencies measured, the most important are trust, communication, business analysis, elicitation and client experience thinking. Employers rate SOA knowledge, ERP knowledge and Mathematical and Statistical competencies as the least important attributes. Analysed at a group level (italicised in Table 1) employers consider business interpersonal competency and organisation knowledge as the most important whilst technical competency is ranked as the least important. These findings concur with the top two competencies required for ERP consultants in South Africa [14]. Employers are most satisfied with the business interpersonal competency and the business process analyst fundamental competency but are least satisfied with the technical competency. These results show that employers are most satisfied with the competency they deem important, namely the business interpersonal competency. These findings are inconsistent with studies conducted on satisfaction with general ICT skills which have shown that in general employers are not satisfied with interpersonal skills of graduates [6]. The five hypotheses are now tested. Table 1: Employer’s ratings on the Importance and Satisfaction of Business Process Analysis competencies Competency
Importance
Satisfaction
Valid N Mean Rank Mean Rank
Trustworthiness Business Communication Business Analysis Business Requirement elicitation Client Experience Thinking Holistic Overview Business Process Thinking Business Process Improvement Organisation Knowledge Facilitation & Leadership skills Business Process & value chain modelling Business Process risk & compliance assessment BPM driver & promoter User Interface design skills Mathematical & Statistical skills ERP skills SOA skills Business Interpersonal Competency Organisation Knowledge Business Process Analyst Fundamental Competency Business Process Orchestration Competency Technical Competency
56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56 56
1.55 1.57 1.66 1.68 1.75 1.79 1.79 1.98 1.98 2.23 2.32 2.39 2.79 2.96 3.07 3.09 1.70 1.98 2.04 2.18 2.98
1 2 3 4 5 6 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5
2.05 2.25 2.34 2.38 2.50 2.57 2.59 2.61 2.64 2.66 2.66 2.68 2.70 2.77 2.77 2.82 2.42 2.46 2.61 2.64 2.75
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5
Competency Gap Mean Mean Competency Required Graduate GAP Level Level (H to L)
5.89 5.66 5.82 5.73 5.68 5.66 6.02 5.54 5.52 5.50 5.45 5.27 4.89 4.64 4.02 4.20 5.70 5.54 5.45 5.56 4.37
4.95 4.14 3.55 3.79 3.68 3.61 3.96 3.11 3.57 3.61 3.43 3.43 3.57 4.05 3.09 3.07 4.11 3.11 3.72 3.61 3.24
0.95 1.52 2.27 1.95 2.00 2.05 2.05 2.43 1.95 1.89 2.02 1.84 1.32 0.59 0.93 1.13 1.59 2.43 1.73 1.95 1.13
6.1. H1: Interpersonal Competencies are more important than Technical Competencies. The mean for interpersonal competencies versus technical competencies was compared and the results showed that interpersonal competencies are rated more important (1.70) than technical competencies (2.24). A non-parametric Mann Whitney test was conducted to verify these differences, and interpersonal skills are statistically more important than technical skills (p value of 0.044) supporting Hypothesis 1. Table 2 shows the difference in means. These findings validate the framework for business process analysis competencies Copyright © 2014 The authors www.IST-Africa.org/Conference2014
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provided by Sonteya and Seymour [16] and have added to this framework by identifying those competencies which employers consider important. Table 2: Mann Whitney test – Interpersonal competencies and technical competencies Mann Whitney Test
By variable Mean Interpersonal Competencies. Marked tests are significant at p
