I’d like to share my response to comments on my interview with CIO.com:
Thank you for your passionate responses to this subject. Upon reflection, I probably started off my interview painting with too broad a brush. The definition of a business analyst deserves more discussion and analysis than I offered. Maybe I can clarify my position and we can continue the conversation. I take your point – “business analyst” means different things to different people, and on top of that, it’s a continually evolving role.
In fact, much of what’s been said in the CIO.com blog captures my sense of the business analyst pretty accurately. The business analyst brings considerable skill, talent and creativity to the development of an application on behalf of the business stakeholders—not on behalf of the user.
For example, the entry dated April 28, 2008, titled What Do Business Analysts Actually Do for Software Implementation Projects, runs through a list that resonates with my own experience with BAs: they “interpret business needs” help “spell out project details and requirements,” and “represent project stakeholders throughout the process.” The BA’s role can continue right up through user acceptance testing – but don’t be deceived: UAT is not usability testing. It does not observe whether or not the application works easily, intuitively or well for end users in the workplace.
More recently, the CIO.com blog noted that the business analyst role is evolving, (Business Analysts: Role Changes Require New Skill Sets). This evolving role, according to a recent Forrester survey and analysis, includes working within different development methods, like Agile, but again, it doesn’t suggest any growth that would consider the end user to any greater degree.
In my experience, business analysts do not focus on the needs and goals of an end user – that person who is going to have to use the technology to get his or her job done in a setting that has its own constraints and demands, be it the factory floor, an emergency room, or the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
That is why I say that a business analyst cannot take the place of a designer. Think of design as something that includes but is much more than aesthetics. Designers are trained to investigate, understand, and translate to both business stakeholders and developers the language, culture, and context into which the proposed tool is going to be injected. What are the user’s expectations? What pressures do they operate under and what expectations must they meet? What are the limitations under which this tool is going to have to operate?
