Ron Tolido of Capgemini presented on the case for an open methodology for business analysis. There’s a big component of standardization here, particularly a shared language (terminology, not necessarily natural language) to enable collaboration. He considers the core competencies of business analysis to be information analysis, subject matter expertise and business process management, there’s also an aspect of consultancy around managing change.
In spite of his categorization of BPM as an “IT tool”, he highlighted the importance of process in business analysis today, and how process orchestration (although he didn’t call it that) and business rules can create applications much faster than before. This allows business rules to be changed on the fly in order to tune the business processes, and the creation of configurable user experiences by non-IT people.
Echoing the confusion of the previous presentation on the IIBA, Tolido stated that business architecture and business analysis are different, although business analysts might be involved in business architecture work without being business architects themselves. It appears that he’s making the distinction of business analysts as project-specific resources, and business architects as enterprise resources, although it’s not clear what functions or capabilities are different. There was a lot of audience interest in this issue; there appears to be the will to combine the disciplines in some way, but it’s just not there yet. I’m not sure that there’s sufficient common understanding of the term “architecture” as it pertains to non-technical disciplines.