May

27

On Enterprise Analysis and Strategic Thinking

May 27, 2007 |

I personally (speaking as myself and not in my IIBA role) have never agreed with the common view that a BA should be simply a translator between business and IT. Certainly, much of the time those two groups have different mindsets and different ways of viewing the world, but as the Agile community likes to point out, the best solution there is to educate IT so that they actually understand what their business users need and make appropriate decisions.

A genuinely effective business analyst is someone who can understand business needs well enough to propose better solutions than the business people can develop on their own. End-users of information technology don’t think strategically about it and that’s not going to change. They don’t have the time or the inclination to think through all the things that they could possibly do. That’s the role that the business analyst needs to take on. The BA should be able to identify the changes to current processes, policies, and applications that will not only support what the organization does today but enable it to rapidly implement changes in the future. In order to do that you need a deep understanding of what kind of strategies the business might need to implement and the overall long-term focus of the enterprise.

However, if you’re going to be developing additional capabilities beyond those needed today, they have to be well-chosen. There’s a very real likelihood that some of those capabilities will never be used at all. That’s not necessarily a waste. As risk management practitioners will tell you, you need to devote some resources for contingencies that never actually come to pass. The challenge is to choose the right kind of flexibility, to make sure that it’s likely enough to be needed to justify the investment.

Another reason BAs need to think strategically is that they need to understand that every requirement needs to be viewed in terms of the costs to implement it and the benefits that implementation will have for the business. One of the things we find working on the BABOK is that a lot of BAs tell us that they never perform Enterprise Analysis (the knowledge area that deals with strategic thinking). If not, I think they’re failing to deliver full value to their business, but I also think a lot of them are stuck viewing enterprise analysis as a pre-project activity rather than as something ongoing. Enterprise analysis involves correctly identifying the scope of the solution, understanding the costs and benefits of that solution, and understanding how it fits into the bigger picture and the overall business architecture. I have a hard time understanding how a project can be successful if a BA doesn’t do those things.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Diana Cagle on May 31, 2007 7:48 am

    Amen Kevin! Strategic analysis is where BAs bring real value to their organization. I love that you mentioned cost/benefit analysis at the requirement level! Considering the c/b of each requirement prevents high dollar, low benefit requirements from making the cut, which usually occurs because a director level or above requested something that will rarely, if ever, matter and no one wants to say no.

  2. The role of BA : Tomas Kohl on April 27, 2008 6:37 pm

    [...] ALSO HAD A PROBLEM classifying the role of Business Analyst as a bridge between business and IT, but if the Agile [...]

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