Failure of Business Schools to Understand Business Processes in Service Organizations

Paul Harmon at bptrends.com observes that Business Schools teach processes functionally...

"Business schools are organized around functional departments, just as most organizations are, and they teach courses along those functional lines - marketing, strategy and planning, finance and accounting and operations. Most business schools regard "processes" as an element within operations, reflecting the history of processes
and manufacturing."

and

"Recall our business school with its functional organizational structures. The idea that a modern business school would try to analyze "process" as an element within operations, and somehow separate from whatever it is that we do when we analyze customers, is not only out-of-date, it leads to error."


I would postulate that given the very nature of education (specialist driven) that there exists weakness to teach about cross-functional or cross-operational synergies. At the very least there is very low exposure to cross-functional view of organizations.