Working for e-Business - The Business Engineering Approach

Driven by IT innovations and new business paradigms, the transformation of traditional business models and business architectures to electronic business is imposing huge challenges particularly for large organizations. This paper introduces business engineering, the discipline of collaborative, model-based conceptualization, design, and implementation of transformations in companies and in administration. Based on an analysis of the transformation to electronic business, business engineering is introduced with regard to its vision (business architecture and business models of the information age), its most important components, and its methods. Based on an analysis of the roles of business engineers in ‘old’ and ‘new ’ companies, the career options for business engineers are analyzed, and requirements for educational institutions are derived. The paper ends with some conclusions and directions for future research.