Congratulations on completing your MBA! Looking back on your journey, what is one thing you’ll miss most about your time at Goethe Business School?

Thank you so much! That’s a tough question for the start, as I remember many aspects of my Goethe MBA studies fondly. Singling one out is quite a challenge, but for me, it is the discussions both inside and outside of class. The program brings together a diverse mix of people with various professional, cultural, and educational backgrounds. Leaving one’s known environment in discussion is providing new insights and perspectives I would not have obtained otherwise.

Your thesis focuses on assessing the complexity of business processes. What sparked your interest in this topic, and why is it particularly relevant for organizations undergoing digital transformation?

Prof. Julia Krönung held an outstanding lecture on business processes, which I highly valued. As a theoretical physicist, I am especially interested in complex systems which are notoriously hard to analyze. Assessing their complexity is the first step towards better understanding these systems. In my thesis, I developed the design and prototypical implementation of software that enables complexity assessment of processes modeled in different languages, utilizing an array of various complexity metrics.

Such a tool can help organizations to identify complexity drivers within their process landscape to enable process redesign based on a scientifically grounded evaluation. Digitalization is first and foremost a processual change within an organization that can be supported by proper, quantitative guidance.

Your research brings together process management, data-driven analysis, and software prototyping. What did you learn from combining these different perspectives, and what potential do you see for applying your approach in practice?

That modern organizational structures are embedded within a very demanding and accelerating environment. To cope with this change, such a multi-sided approach is necessary to accurately assess the full picture. But the challenges of our time are not solved with one tool, one decision, or one approach, but through combining knowledge of different domains to steer change in a successful direction. In practice, I believe that this is just a small start on improving science-based analysis. The good news is that such a tool can be paired with existing solutions for process discovery, as often the real processes within an organization are not fully known or not yet modeled. Together, these allow one to implement a pipeline for continuous process discovery, evaluation, and redesign. In the end, this simplifies good governance from which everyone benefits.

Alongside your MBA, you also completed the CAS Data Science & AI and the CAS Digital Transformation Management. What motivated you to pursue these additional certificates at the same time as your MBA?

Goethe Business School allows one to elect and combine courses that best fit the individual student. I am mainly interested in methodological knowledge, or to put it simply: How to do things? Both certificates combine courses that fulfill two requirements I personally think are important: Actuality and applicability. Data Science and AI are the technological foundation upon which our digital society and economy are built. Gaining a better insight into this foundation allows one to develop the skills necessary to be successful in this context. Digital Transformation is what follows from these technological advancements. Managing this transformation is what decides whether it is successful or not. Understanding both the foundation and what to build upon it is why I chose those key areas of focus.  

What was the biggest challenge of balancing work and study, and what did you find most rewarding about the experience?

Coordination is the main challenge. Completing an MBA is not a battle one fights alone but an endeavor one pursues with the support of a study group within the program and of course friends and family outside the program. This means that all the emerging tasks, deadlines, and obligations must be well managed and prioritized, which cannot be free of conflicting interests. However, the reward is to gain new knowledge, to create a good submission, or to write a good exam. It is always important to reflect on what the course teaches one and how one can apply this in practice. For me, it was always most rewarding to make a difference through the skills and knowledge I obtained through the program.

Now that you have completed your MBA, how do you see yourself applying what you learned in your future work, and is there a particular area you are especially keen to explore further?

Definitely! I am working in the banking industry, which is a fully digital industry, but an industry facing large challenges and changes in the future. As many people are leaving the European workforce in the upcoming years and competition with US-American banks is rising, banking will inevitably change. To facilitate this change, the research focus of my thesis is relevant but also the contents of the overall program. Scientifically, I am keen to explore more into the direction of process design as AI adoption fundamentally changes organizational structure and processes. From this, interesting new questions and challenges arise, which I would like to pursue in the future.