Jim SinurBusiness Analysts have been around for a long time in a number of organizations, but there are a number of factors that are putting a premium on this position. There is a latent demand for good business analysts powering a supply gap. . One proof point is that the International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) has grown dramatically to over 12,000 members overnight.
![MPj04230510000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/12/WindowsLiveWriterAPerfectStormisGeneratingaWaveofBusiness_D534MPj042305100001_2.jpg)
See http://www.theiiba.org/am/ The pressure is on to define this role more precisely and develop a curriculum that develops the best business analysts as soon as yesterday. What are the forces of this brewing storm?
The Traditional Drivers:
The original need for solid business analysis revolved around developing requirements for IT. The need persists for configuring application packages, developing services and creating composite applications. This is still growing.
Business Intelligence (BI) continues to drive the need for more business analysts in that the interpretation of business trends needs constant analysis. Business management needs the support of business analysts to perform analytics and help identify important trends.
The New Drivers:
It is no longer acceptable for businesses to only drive through the rear view mirror of BI. Today’s organizations need to play in the here and now with Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). Most organizations also need to predict directions of markets and customer behavior, thus putting more demand for analysis
Business Process Management (BPM) requires business analysts to craft business process models and business rules that control the dynamic flow of processes. BA’s also need to configure work lists and role workbenches along with process dashboards. Continually improving processes requires careful analysis. Another new tributary for BA demand
Pattern Based Strategies (PBS) requires analysts to search for emerging events and behaviors in order to guide management decisions and policy adjustments. BA’s will be important in searching for patterns and/or configuring Complex Events Processing (CEP) CEP needs models of patterns to actively look for on a second by second basis.
The wave of need for business analysts has not crested yet and how high the wave will be is anybody’s guess. I would guess huge beyond imagination and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Green Optimization Simulation Tags: BPM, Business Rules, Green, Optimization, Simulation
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2 Nigel Warren December 11, 2009 at 11:22 am
Earlier this year I had a very insightful conversation with HSBC – who described two communities “Run The bank” and “Change The bank”. According to their Head of Process Excellence –
“….there’s a problem with the term ‘Business Analyst’ because that means they’re supposed to be analyzing. But if you talk to them you soon find that they spend all their time in business discovery. They spend their time trying to get meetings with the Run The Bank people to work out what they do. Now in a good situation Run The Bank are able to articulate that, but why do they need to have those meetings? Surely if the company is run well – Run The Bank would simply point Change The Bank at a website and say, ‘There you are. That’s what we do. Oh and by the way, it’s all up-to-date, and we’ve been audited and our risk profile is good.’ If that’s the case, just think about how your Change The Bank people are able to execute well. Think about how your support people are better able to execute operational risk, internal audit compliance. People should focus much more on Run The Bank, to me that’s the soul of the company. If you do that brilliantly everyone else’s job becomes much easier and where I’ve seen this work it’s very quick to put things in place because you’re not asking, ‘What do you do now?’, you’re asking, ‘How can we make this better?’ …”
So how to make this possible? It’s a blend of process management and knowledge management, and the key enabler is business friendly process modelling, enabling the business rather than highly trained analysts to take the lead for managing their processes, documenting them in a simple, consistent and governed way which is useful for operational staff, rather than BPMN or EPC style plumbing diagrams which are typically off-putting to business users.
To hear more about this, Listen to the Gartner Podcast involving Gartner analyst Bill Rosser and Gartner Fellow David McCoy here http://imagesrv.gartner.com/media/audio/bill_rosser_uf_bpmodeling.mp3