I was invited to sit in at a CIO Roundtable discussion last week. I went hoping to get some useful tips that I could apply to helping the IIBA’s IT run more smoothly. I didn’t get those, but I got something else very valuable.

The CIOs in attendance spent about 30 minutes discussing their biggest organizational challenges. They talked about the way IT is viewed in their organizations, what problems their projects are encountering, and the difficulties they have dealing with the people running the business. And almost every problem they described had a common theme: a lack of business analysis skills.

More specifically, though, the weren’t talking about the things that consume most of the discussions about requirements: change management, getting requirements right, and so forth. Those problems barely rated a mention. Their real problems involve demonstrating the value of IT to the business, building business cases to justify spending, understanding how to use IT to take advantage of business opportunities, ensuring that the business understands how to leverage IT effectively, ensuring that solutions actually deliver the value that the project was supposed to produce, and measuring the effectiveness of solutions.

In BABOK terms, almost every problem faced by these CIOs was addressed in Enterprise Analysis or Solution Assessment and Validation.

So if you want to advance your career, I’d suggest sitting down with those two chapters and thinking hard about how to find opportunities to perform that kind of work. CIOs aren’t looking for BAs to faithfully record what our stakeholders ask for and then provide a nice set of stable documents to the development team. They’re looking for people who can take a set of business goals and devise a workable strategy to implement them. Yes, requirements are important. But they’re a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Body of Knowledge