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Mon, Nov 16, 2009 11:02 EST

Business Agility and the New Role of the Business Analyst

Business analysts are indispensable agents for achieving business agility

Topic: Enterprise Management

Blog: Doing Business in Real Time

Current Rating: 5 Comments: 7

For the last decade the software developer has been the only rock star of our Internet driven world. That’s about to change. The gee-whiz effect created by Web 2.0 applications, social media, smart phones and cloud computing has worn off and people don't need to be programmers any more to use these technologies; now companies want to use them to drive business and make money. That’s where the business analyst comes in.

Kevin Brennan, Vice President of Professional Development at the International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) puts it like this, “The concept of IT/Business alignment is problematic at best – to say that IT needs to be better aligned with business presumes that it might have some other purpose.” Exactly. In business (unlike in research or academic organizations) the only reason for technology is to enable companies to better respond to change, to cut costs and make money. This calls for people who understand business and technology and see how to combine the two in profitable ways.

In a series of conversations, Kevin Brennan and I discussed the new role of the business analyst and what the future holds for people who build careers in this field. To structure our conversation, we articulated a central idea or axiom and then defined four key propositions that flow from that axiom. Presented below are that axiom and our thoughts related to the four key propositions.

CENTRAL AXIOM: Pressing economic needs for business agility are changing how companies operate and business analysts are indispensable in leveraging new technologies to support the agile enterprise.

If change is the one predictable thing in a world where everything else is so unpredictable, then companies optimized to deal with change will certainly be more successful than companies not optimized to deal with change. That’s why responsiveness and agility are so relevant to this economy. That’s why agility and the business practices that bring it about are the foundation for business success.

Web searches on phrases such as “business agility” and “IT agility” illustrate the rapidly growing popularity of agile practices. Many well known companies around the world are either proclaiming their intentions to be agile, or announcing the availability of products and services to help their customers become agile.

To actually become agile though, companies need to adopt agile practices (many of them pioneered and proven by the agile IT community) and use the newest generation of web-based technologies to create systems that support agile and responsive operations. Enter the business analyst - someone who speaks both the language of business and the language of technology and can creatively apply technology to meet business needs.

PROPOSITION 1. Companies need to redesign workflows and operating processes to continually respond to changing market conditions and customer desires.

MICHAEL H. - The next wave of innovation and productivity will be process based. A combination of processes that are coming to be collectively known as the agile or real-time enterprise will become the basis for successful business practices in this century. The agile real-time enterprise is an organization that employs a set of processes enabled by information technology with an organizational structure that allows it to acquire and act on up-to-date information to continually improve existing operations and devise new operations as conditions change and opportunities arise.

Companies can no longer attempt to fine-tune their operations to fit some present set of conditions and then expect to simply run those operations unchanged for years and years. The electronically connected real-time economy of the 21st century behaves like a gigantic stock market with all the unpredictability and opportunity that implies.


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Wed, Nov 18, 2009 21:34 EST
Anonymous user
Posted by: Anonymous
Rating:

Very informative article. It covers the past, present & future of a BA.
Great work!

 
Tue, Nov 24, 2009 16:12 EST
Anonymous user
Posted by: Tony Markos
Rating: 10

Micheal Hugos wrote:

Process mapping is a great technique for an agile BA to use to illustrate existing business workflows and combine ideas from many different people to design new workflows because it uses a graphic diagram format (instead lots of text) and is easily understood by business and technical people.

Tony Markos responds:

A very important consideration is missing here. An article just previous to yours on Modern Analysis.com stated that, in Agile projects, the BA needs to up-front perform a high-level analysis to arrive at a "high-level roadmap". (This analysis is used as the primary input to a variety of subsequent Agile tasks, such as system scoping and requirements priortization for Agile iterations.)

Problem: Process mapping typically refers to flow diagrams that are primarily based upon flow of control/flow of sequence. Howevr, at higher levels, both manual and automated systems, especially other than smallish ones, are characterized as potentially having many processes happening at the same time and processes that can happen in any order. Such behavior makes it almost impossible to use typical process mapping techniques to document systems at higher levels of abstraction as there is no defined sequence or set flow of control.

FYI: I myself relly upon data flow diagrams to capture such behavior.

Bottom Line: Traditional process mapping techniques are not appropriate for the all important up-front "big picture" analysis required on Agile projects. They may, however, be appropriate for the more detail-level analysis done during the subsequent iterative development cycles.

Tony Markos

 
Tue, Nov 24, 2009 21:09 EST
Posted by: Michael Hugos
Rating:

Tony,

You are a man after my own heart. You are spot on with your observation that data flow diagrams are the best way to capture the high level roadmap.

I said "process mapping" because I whimped out and didn't want to be called old fashioned because I'm using a technique invented 30 years ago - Data Flow Diagramming - instead of a newer, improved technique (UML anyone?) to record the all important big picture view. Data flow diagramming as presented by Ed Yourdon and Tom DeMarco is still the best way to deal with the complexity that you describe and capture essential process flow information in an easy to understand graphical format.

Data flow diagramming is a form of process mapping, but a lot of process mapping techniques are way too detailed and focus on the logic of low level task sequences so they actually become "flow charting" like what programmers used 40 years ago to illustrate the logic of their programs. And that's way too detailed to be useful to Business Analysts doing big picture analysis and workflow process redesign work.

(I talk about this in a Computerworld column I wrote a couple of years ago, titled "Five Diagrams Beat a 'Victorian Novel' Text Specification" - http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/302719/Five_Diagrams_Beat_a_Victorian_Novel)

Thank you for bringing this up,
Michael

 
Thu, Dec 3, 2009 21:36 EST
Anonymous user
Posted by: Manager of Agile Project Managers
Rating:

A very well written and concise article that I will be using with a few project managers here!

Unfortunately, my still-virginal organisation (agile-wise) suffers from an external "expert" who is proving to be a 'newbie' masquerading as 'expert'. This is having serious consequences for highly skilled BAs who are being limited to developing use cases with no high level roadmaps, process flows/design or overall planning being undertaken.

This is killing off agile here before it can get a good start - and the impact on the budget....well enough said!

 
Mon, Dec 7, 2009 0:49 EST
Anonymous user
Posted by: intelligentform
Rating:

'Absolutely - and what sort of tools do they have to leverage corporate agility? http://www.idiomsoftware.com/pdfs/IDIOM%20Decisioning.pdf

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