Mike BlecharOne of the frequent questions I get from Gartner customers concerns the role and focus of a “business analyst” and whether it belongs in IT or other business units. I generally find that the scope of responsibility the client is asking about spans multiple “roles” which in large organizations are filled by different job positions. Moreover, those who have a single job position for “a business analyst” generally have it be more focused on tactical needs at the expense of the – in some cases more valuable – vision for the future business needs which may prove to provide greater strategic value to the organization.
The three most common roles which the clients frequently ask me about when describing what they want a “business analyst” to do include the following:
1) The Business Architect role, which has business domain expertise and is focused on business improvement opportunities related to organizational, process and financial changes within and across business units. Business Architects need to collaborate with those responsible for the technology, information and application architectures to move forward towards the vision of the overall enterprise future solution architecture. It is through the collaboration of the business architects that cross-business unit business process improvement opportunities for shared and end-to-end business processes get identified.
2) The Business Process Analyst role, which has business domain expertise in the processes being implemented or changed as part of a development or application package implementation “project”. This role also facilitates answers to questions about the business from the IT Analysts as part of a development project. Where the organization has a “business process management suite” of tools, the Business Process Analyst can even take process decomposition down to a workflow design level and, where appropriate, can implement these as workflows through assembly of existing software and data services without having to deal with a development project (or, therefore, the IT Analyst).
3) The IT Analyst (or lead analyst) role, which has IT domain expertise and does the application architecture analysis and design for the processes being implemented or changed as part of a development project. The IT Analyst collaborations with the Business Process Analyst in terms of understanding business requirements and business domain-oriented questions. Increasingly, this role is being expanded to include the broader scope of what an “Solution Architect” does in terms of coming up with the best design of the application from an application architecture perspective.
In smaller organizations, these three roles frequently get combined into the role of a “business analyst” or “developer” – but generally with a greater focus on the IT Analyst role within a given project. In this case, the IT Analyst would have only limited business domain knowledge of the process being implemented and would be expected to uncover the domain knowledge and requirements from the end users directly.
Note: Ideally, all organizations have implemented the role of the Enterprise Solution Architect to help backfill the coordination and collaboration role needed across business, technology, information and application architectures in order to make for a smoother transition of the application portfolio forward.
While all three of the “business analyst” roles I mentioned generally reside in the IT organization, we are seeing rapid movement of the Business Architect and Business Process Analyst roles being transferred into the end user business units, if for no other reason than to allow them to take control of their own future. But another key driver is the fact that in many/most organizations more than 50% of business processes are “human to human” in nature and do not involve IT-built and supported applications – so there is no need for IT domain expertise in redesigning these processes. The IT Analyst role continues to exist predominantly within IT – though as increased business user/citizen developers begin to appear in the business units, the need for IT analysts also in the business units may increase.
Gartner customers can obtain more information on the roles of the business architect and business process analyst – and other roles related to business process management – in following research notes:
Business Analyst and Architect Roles Are Different
Role Definition and Organizational Structure: BPI
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1 response so far ↓
1 Gordon September 22, 2011 at 9:30 am
A worthwhile investigation into this great question.
I am increasingly getting the feeling that although the value of the BA is shared by the IT and Business, it is the Business which has the greatest vested interest in outcomes. I would envision that Business Units (i.e. eCommerce, Finance) investing in an IT Business Analyst in order to more fully have ownership of the solution during the project life cycle. In a growing organization, having a Jr IT BA evolve to a Sr IT BA within a business unit would make sense and deliver better leverage.
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