What is a Business Analyst?
by Al Santucci, Holly James and Debbie Gencarelli
The Search for a Business Analyst
Thoughts from a Recruiting Manager
The Casey Group is a professional services firm specializing in custom software development and outsourcing. Our search for Business Analysts led us to the International Institute of Business Analysis and, subsequently, to the Requirements Networking Group. What we discovered was that, while the Business Analyst function has matured over the years into a specialty discipline, it still means different things to different people, employers and practitioners alike. From the standpoint of a staffing manager for a professional services firm, this is how we see it.
What is a Business Analyst?
This proved to be a more difficult question than we thought it would be. And the answer, as for so many things, is “…it depends.” In our attempt to fully define the requirements of the position in order to locate the most qualified individuals, we spoke to hiring managers, Project Managers and Technical Architects. The problem we ran into was that there is not just one concept of a Business Analyst. And even within the Business Analyst function, there are different sub-functions that can evolve as specialties in and of themselves. There is a continuum from a Lead Analyst to an analysis tool expert technician. Sometimes we look for one person who can perform all the functions, oftentimes we need a team.
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What is our scope? and where do we report?
(1)I will be the first to admit/pronounce that what I do as a business analyst falls within the realm of information systems. When I consider enterprise architecture and/or analysis, it is still within the context of information management. What I read about EA often implies it is the basis of actually running/managing the whole enterprise, that the business needs EA if it is going to be truly successful; until I see otherwise, I think that is overstating the case, and can cloud the real benefit of architecture for information systems.
(2) Where should BA's be placed in the organization? I think the usual choice between Business and IT is a red herring. The real partition of activities in a company is between operations and projects. The former is running the business while the latter is changing the business. It has just evolved that many (majority?) of project activities are IT-related, so the people doing the IT projects are grouped together, including the BAs, while the rest of the company keeps things going, Even within IT, there is a separation between development/maintenance and actual system operations... and long before IT, companies had both operations and projects; consider the old-style time and motion studies, projects carried out by specialists to improve (change) the company's operations. These days we have Six Sigma Black Belts running process improvement projects, without IT (and without BA's) if there is no information system component to the improvement.
In any case, organizational structures come and go while the work itself stays much the same. That's OK, because org charts organize actual people, and the way people inter-relate to get work done changes over time, but when was the last time a re-org actually changed your job itself?
David Wright
Member, IIBA
"As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information."
Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)