Opinion: It's time to say goodbye to business analysts

Computerworld - Is there a place for business analysts in IT today? Not if their primary function is just to analyze business needs. As the pace of change accelerates, business people want more than analysis; they want workable solutions to their problems.

Analysis is only part of the job that needs to be done. It can clarify situations and trends, identify problems and make recommendations. But most analysis serves only to educate the business analyst. Business people who live with the situations being analyzed already know 98% of what the analysis will tell them.

There are two other important parts of the job: creativity and synthesis. Analysis is where we determine business needs, specify performance requirements and find out what resources we have to work with. Creativity is where we come up with ideas for combining available resources to create systems that could meet performance requirements. Synthesis is where the best ideas are evaluated and modified until good solutions are found.

A single person who does all three of those things isn't really a business analyst. He or she is a systems designer.

And designers are what businesses need today. Increasingly, companies are encountering situations never seen before. Under current conditions, the value of analysis decreases rapidly unless it is combined with creativity and synthesis. If we overemphasize analysis, we end up relying too heavily on so-called best practices as we try to fit all the situations we encounter into categories that have well-defined answers. This can work for known problems, but not for problems that are new and different. No amount of analysis will ever produce a new idea all by itself.

Systems designers, who combine analysis with creativity and synthesis, need to understand that just four techniques that have been evolving in the IT profession for several decades are key to the design of information systems. These techniques are group facilitation, process mapping, data modeling and user interface prototyping. They transcend any particular technology or any particular industry, so they are a stable foundation to use for giving structure to the work involved in all three parts of the system design process.

Group facilitation is essential for getting input from everyone who might have relevant information and insights on a business process. As they gather this input, designers use process mapping to create diagrams that capture task sequences for existing and new workflows. And they use data modeling to diagram the structure of the data those workflows operate on. Then designers use proto­types of user interface screens to illustrate how people can interact with the system to do their jobs.