Business Analyst – The Lost Art Form

Continuing my trend of business related blog entries, I thought I’d comment on Martin Spedding’s latest blog entry, “Outsource Coding, When Not If”.  Some of what he is saying I agree with, but outsourcing has been around forever, and has had limited success.  I can’t see the outsourcing success rate increasing in the near future.  The major reason is due to the lost art form that was the Business Analyst’s role.  The way it is suppose to work is the business analyst understands the business process, the system analyst talks to the business analyst and builds those needs into a corporate wide systems approach, and the programmer analyst talks to the system analyst to make sure the program meets the needs of the business users, and the corporate systems needs.  During the 90’s the business analyst’s role was slowly diminished to the point that the position is rarely used anymore. The death of the analyst role was also fueled by the mass exodus from these positions to development positions during the Dot Com boom, and once things went bust, out went to developers, along with their analyst role.  I have not seen a come back yet, but believe that in order to survive, companies will need to revive these roles.  There was a time in the late 90’s where people predicted that a Systems Analyst with an MBA was the career choice of the future, but the future is here, and I still don’t see these positions, and my consulting clients are Fortune 100 companies.  If they are ever going to get outsourcing to work, they are going to have to bring back the analyst roles.

Thus, you need to have the programmers and business users in the same room to get most projects done correctly.  There are many exceptions that can be mentioned, but most of them have well documented specs.  And even with great specs, a lot can be left to interpretation.  That’s where the old water cooler conversations come in handy.

DonXML