business – Page 3

Blog Monetization

The next session that I attended was Andrea Tomkins talking about how to make money through advertising on your blog. She started with ways that blogs can pay off without direct monetization, such as driving other sorts of business (just as this blog often drives first contacts for my consulting business) and leveraging free trips to conferences, but her main focus was on how she sells ads on her blog.

She believes that selling your own ad space results in higher quality advertising by allowing you to select the advertisers who you want on your site and control many of the design aspects. Plus, you get to keep all the cash. She believes in charging a flat monthly rate rather than by impressions or clicks, and to set the rates, she looked at the rates for local newspapers; however, newspapers are very broad-based whereas blog audiences are much more narrowly focused, meaning that the people reading your blog come from a specific demographic that certain advertisers would really like to have access to. Andrea’s blog is a “parenting lifestyle” blog – a.k.a. “mommyblogger” – and she has 1,300-1,400 daily views, many of whom are local to her Ottawa area.

She started out charging $50/month/ad, and bumped it for new clients as well as an annual increase until she reached a sweet spot in the pricing (which she didn’t disclose). She doesn’t sell anything less than a 3-month term, and some advertisers have signed up for a 12-month spot. Her first advertiser, who is still with her, is a local candy store that she and her family frequented weekly – she felt that if she loved it so much, then her readers would probably enjoy it as well. She approached the store directly to solicit the ad, although now many of her new advertisers come to her when they see her blog and how it might reach their potential audience.

She controls the overall ad design: the ad space is a 140×140 image with a link to their website, with the images being updated as often as the advertisers wish. New ads are added to the bottom of the list, so advertisers are incented to maintain their relationship with her in order to maintain their placement on the site.

She also writes a welcome post for each advertiser; she writes this as her authentic opinion, and doesn’t just publish some PR from the advertiser since she doesn’t want to alienate her readers. Each advertiser has the opportunity to host a giveaway or contest for each 3-month term, although she doesn’t want to turn her blog into a giveaway blog because that doesn’t match her blogging style. She also uses her social network to promote her advertisers in various ways, whether through personal recommendations, on her Facebook page or Twitter; because she only takes advertisers that she believes in, she can really give a personal recommendation for any of them.

Before you call a potential advertiser, she recommends understanding your traffic, figuring out an ad design and placement, and coming up with a rate sheet. Don’t inflate your traffic numbers: you’ll be found out and look like an idiot, and most advertisers are more interested in quality engagement than raw numbers anyway. Everyone pays the same rate on Andrea’s blog; she doesn’t charge more for “above the fold” ads or use a placement randomizer, so sometimes has some new advertisers (who are added to the bottom) complain about placement.

A rate sheet should be presented as a professionally-prepared piece of collateral coordinated with your business cards, blog style and other marketing pieces. It needs to include something about you, the deal you’re offering, your blog, your audience and traffic, and optionally some testimonials from other advertisers.

Handling your own ads does create work. You need to handle contacts regarding ads (she doesn’t publish her rates), invoice and accept payments, track which ads need to run when, set up contracts, and provide some reporting to the advertisers. Obviously, there has to be a better way to manage this without resorting to giving away some big percentage to an ad network. She also writes personal notes to advertisers about when their ad might have been noticed in something that Andrea did (like a TV appearance) or when she is speaking and hence might have their ads be more noticed. She does not publish ads in her feed, but publishes partial feeds so readers are driven to her site to read the full posts, and therefore see the ads. She has started sending out a newsletter and may be selling advertising separately for that.

This started a lot of ideas in my head about advertising. I used to have Google ads in my sidebar, which pretty much just paid my hosting fees, but I took them out when it started to feel a bit…petty. As long as I get a good part of my revenue from end-customer organizations to help them with their BPM implementations, it would be difficult to accept ads here and maintain the appearance of independence. Although I do work for vendors as an analyst and keep those parts of my business completely separate, with appropriate disclosure to clients, it is just as important to have the public appearance of impartiality as well as actually be impartial. An ongoing dilemma.

My New MOO Cards

Those of you who have met me in person have probably seen my business cards: plain on the front, with the necessary information, and a Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back.

These StreetCards cards have served me well for a couple of years, but as my current stock declined, I thought it was time for a change. Coincidentally, an invitation from MOO to try out their cards landed in my inbox, and I took advantage of their offer for 50 free business cards.

MOO loves color and images, and of their many options for business cards, I selected to have photographs from my Flickr collection printed on the back (I could have also uploaded the photos directly, or imported from Etsy, Facebook or SmugMug). This meant combing through almost 7,000 photos to find my 50 favorites, probably the most time-consuming part of the process; next time, I’ll probably just select 5-10 faves and have them repeated over the print run. I could have also selected from their patterns (like some amazing ones from the UK Science Museum) or colored text options for the back of the card, but I liked the idea of something that was a bit more personal.

I entered the text for the front of the cards, which allowed me to select a variety of layouts, fonts, alignment and text/background color: completely easy interface, and a preview of the final design. I selected the MOO Green card stock, which is made of 100% recycled post consumer waste, is recyclable and biodegradable, and was manufactured using wind power. I felt virtuous as I clicked the Next button.

The order was pretty fast, they had the printing done within a couple of days, and even though it was shipped from the US to Toronto, it only took about a week via USPS. For those of us in Canada receiving goods from the US, USPS is hugely superior to most courier services since they handle the duty and customs brokerage, so there are no extra fees to pay on receipt.

The unboxing of the cards reminded me of how a playful yet customer-focused organization works: the cards were in a box that included two little dividers labeled “Mine” and “Theirs”, so that I can take the box to a conference, hand out and receive cards, and store them all in the handy box until I am back in my office. They also include a hilarious “Buzzword Challenge” game on a card, inviting you to use such phrases as “data-fluffed” and “future-retroactivate” at your next meeting to see how long it takes before someone asks you what they mean.

The cards themselves are lovely. The recycled paper has a slightly rougher texture than a standard business card, but a fairly clean white look, and holds the colors of the printed photographs well.

The verdict: I’d order MOO cards again. I like the use of color and images, and the ability to customize. At around $0.50 per card, they’re a bit pricey for business cards but about the same as the StreetCards that I was already using; I hand out so few business cards each year that it’s worth it to make each one a bit more memorable. As an independent, I can make my business cards look as I please rather than having to follow corporate guidelines, but I’ve also seen people with social media positions in larger companies use the mini MOO cards for their Twitter, blog and other social info that might not be on their corporate card.

Disclosure: MOO provided me with a free order of 50 business cards. Next time, I’ll be happy to pay for them.

PegaWORLD: Medco’s Business Transformation

Kenny Klepper, president of Medco Health, gave a keynote on their business transformation, and how Pega has played a part in that. Personalized medicine is at the core of their strategy; that concept, plus their rapid change and growth through acquisition makes business agility a critical competency. They are looking at how to make medicine smarter through delivering pharmaceutical care as well as ongoing genetic research, particularly for patients with chronic and/or complex conditions. Since poor management of chronic and complex diseases leads to $350B in excess healthcare costs each year in the US, getting a better handle on this is important for the patients, for healthcare providers and ultimately (given the new healthcare bill in the US) on everyone in the country via tax burden. This isn’t about reducing care: it’s about making sure that the right people are getting the right care in order to prevent future problems.

Shifting focus to agile enterprises, he talked about the necessity of agility in order to address changing requirements, and to reduce operating expenses. He sees high operational expenses as an indicator of lack of agility in an enterprise, and hence agility as a primary way to drive down operating expenses. An agile enterprise needs to have a strong underlying technology platform to allow new applications to be built and deployed with a minimum of new investment: their architecture includes a data warehouse, a data management layer, data “fabric”, a service bus, and application frameworks on top of all of that. That provides wide access to information – no one needs to reinvent data access protocols, for example – and allows business applications to be built easily and quickly (using Pega) on top of the stack. As their business becomes more complex, expanding across lines of business and new markets, they are focusing on the common core processes across those lines, and aligning centers of excellence with those horizontal business processes, not just on lines of business or technologies. This shifts the “hot spot” issues from those processes into the CoEs (e.g., an order processing CoE), providing a single source for resolving problems in similar processes across the entire organization. This, plus the fact that they allocate budgets to the joint control of business and IT (redeploying many IT people to the business-focused CoEs), enables real business-IT alignment.

Klepper noted that the more legacy-bound that your organization is, the harder it is for individual operating units to achieve their goals, and the more conflict there is within IT for competing resources. Their focus, however, is on productivity: he considers that they get Agile methods for free by focusing on the ROI of reducing operational costs through the business applications that they create. To achieve this, however, a key focus for any change agent is on sustaining sponsorship: you can’t keep these initiatives going unless you can successfully sell them internally.

This wasn’t at all a technical talk on how Medco uses Pega; rather, it was a call to arms for the agile enterprise. I hope that some of the attendees, mired in legacy-bound conservative industries, got the message.

Blogging and a Knowledge Scarcity Model Don’t Mix

I recently swapped around my office space, and found some old (paper) notebooks that I browsed through before shredding. One of them, from 2006, contained a page of notes that I jotted down about why consultants don’t blog:

Not enough time
Too few “outside” interests (aside from proprietary customer work), hence nothing interesting to blog about
Knowledge scarcity model

Taking these points one at a time, I consider the time that I put into blogging as part of my marketing budget (if I had such a thing), since most of my new business comes to me because someone reads my blog and thinks that I have something to add to their projects. I also consider it a valuable part of my business social networking, providing a way for me to connect with others to exchange opinions or just build those weak ties that come in handy when you least expect it. It’s also, in some cases, a public version of my note-taking – especially the conference posts – that I often refer back to when I know that I wrote about something, but can’t recall when or where. For all of these reasons, the time that I have spent blogging has paid for itself many times over in revenue, relationships and research.

On the second point, there’s always something that you can write about that has nothing to do with the proprietary work that you do for your customers, but would serve you in the ways that I mention above. Generic technology or management research or readings that you’ve done are always a good place to start; product reviews; links to and comments on interesting posts in your fields; even topics that aren’t directly related to your work but that you find interesting. If your customer has a great case study that they’d like to brag about, you can even include that. The important part is to write about what you’re passionate about, those little things that make you love your job.

The most common reason that I hear from consultants on why they don’t blog – and what clearly drives the mostly content-free blogs that we see from the big analyst firms – is that they’re afraid of people stealing their ideas, especially if they think that they can sell those ideas. To quote my friend Sacha:

If the thought of people stealing your ideas is what’s stopping you from thinking out loud on a blog, you’re not alone. It’s a valid fear. If you’re afraid of your ideas being stolen, your mindset is probably that of knowledge scarcity – that you should hoard knowledge because that’s what gives you power. That makes sense to a lot of people.

Another mindset is that of knowledge abundance. There are plenty of ideas to go around, and sharing knowledge gives you power. That makes sense to a lot of people, too.

She goes on to discuss the value of openly sharing ideas: practice in communicating those ideas, questions and challenges that help you refine those ideas, and the networking and reputation effects.

What I see happening with people who operate in a knowledge scarcity model is that they tend to blog about things on which they don’t place much value, since they don’t want to “give away” their really good stuff. However, this results in a negative feedback loop: your audience knows that you’re feeding them crap, and they tune out. In other words, if you think of knowledge as scarce, then your blog is not going to be very successful. It doesn’t mean that your business won’t be, but failure to share makes for an unpalatable blog.

I tend to operate in a knowledge abundance model: there are a lot of people out there with great ideas too, so let’s share them and make something even better. More importantly, however, my knowledge isn’t some limited bit of intellectual property that I invented in the past and have to horde only for my paying customers: I generate new knowledge every day, every time that I talk to someone or read something interesting or have a new experience. In other words, although I might be judged on the basis of what I’ve done in the past, the real value that I bring is the ability to create new knowledge going forward.

Making Social Media Work For Your Business: Radisson Blu Frankfurt

There’s a great social media story as follow-up to my post on Saturday about getting stuck overnight in Frankfurt but getting great customer service from everyone involved.

First, I have to mention that as I left the Radisson Blu in Frankfurt, I complimented the three young staff members who were at the front desk on the great service that they had provided, telling them that I had blogged and tweeted about it, and they actually high-fived each other with huge smiles on their faces. These people aren’t just providing service according to some playbook, they’re going above and beyond wherever possible, and really enjoying it along the way. That speaks very highly about their management as well as the individuals. So I wasn’t completely surprised to see a tweet this morning from Andreas Stöckli, the GM of the hotel, thanking me for my post and saying that they were putting it on their Facebook fan page. On their Facebook page, they not only linked to my post, they called out Nawid, who I had named in my post, for his “excellent Yes I Can Service”, which means that they are actively rewarding people for providing outstanding service.

This is a really great way to use social media in a business: find mentions of your company on Twitter, blogs or Facebook, then promote those on the social media channels that you’re using (Facebook and Twitter, in the case of the Radisson Blu). While you’re at it, mention members of your own team who did a great job as part of that service interaction with the customer: this makes them feel great and builds morale on your team. Of course, not every online mention of your company will be good, and you need to respond appropriately regardless of the content, but when there’s a good one, you want to make sure that it doesn’t go unnoticed.

In my original post, I didn’t mention how nice the rooms are, or the restaurant and other public spaces, but let me state now that they’re great. The location is convenient to the airport and the city center (although requires a taxi ride to each). And, they have free wifi. I rarely travel to Frankfurt these days, but you can be sure that when I have the opportunity to do so again in the future, I’ll be staying at the Radisson Blu, because Andreas and his team really rock.

Bad Processes? Great Service Makes Up For A Lot

Every process blogger loves to write about their own good and bad process experiences, and I’m no exception. This weekend has been a case of incredibly bad processes, but really good customer service that made up for it. I’m stuck in Frankfurt on my way back to Toronto, and I’m actually not unhappy at all, due to the outstanding service that I’ve received all along the way. The short version: my flight out of Oslo was delayed, which caused me to miss my connection in Frankfurt to travel on to Toronto.

Here’s how the process was seriously broken:

An SAS flight from Oslo to Frankfurt was leaving 15 minutes after my originally scheduled Lufthansa flight, but I was not allowed to switch to that flight because the transfer time in Frankfurt would be below their threshold. As it turns out, if I had taken that flight, which left on time, I would have made my connection, which left 30 minutes late. Instead, I had to take my original flight, which left over 2 hours late, and missed my connection.
With no Lufthansa or Air Canada presence in Oslo, SAS (which is a partner airline) services their customers. When the SAS agents were working with Lufthansa on the phone to try and rebook me, Lufthansa claimed that they couldn’t access my ticket since it was booked on Air Canada. I called Air Canada in London, who said that any changes had to be done by Lufthansa since the first leg of the journey was on Lufthansa. SNAFU.
In Frankfurt, it took over 2 hours for the first/business/gold line to process the 6 people ahead of me (luckily I was not in the plebe line, which had 200+ people). When I got up to the agent, I could see how cumbersome her process was: although my flight had already been rebooked, she went through the options for an earlier flight (I would have only been waitlisted, so didn’t bother), had to reprint a new ticket, book me into the hotel, then manually write up hotel and taxi vouchers. Even worse, the taxi voucher was a 4-part carbonless form; she filled it out, then ripped off and discarded 2 of the parts. My time with her, even though I was on a direct flight that had already been rebooked so was presumably the simplest possible case, was more than 20 minutes. People with more complex routing requirements were taking 45-60 minutes each.

I’m pretty sure that SAS/Lufthansa/Air Canada knew that I wasn’t going to make my connection before I left Oslo; they should have just put me up there for the night and flown me out in the morning. It would have taken me about 10 minutes in Olso rather than the 2+ hours in Frankfurt to deal with the rebooking.

There were some successful process bits:

Someone, somewhere, rebooked me on today’s Air Canada flight when I missed yesterday’s flight, ensuring that I have a seat.
In cases like this, Lufthansa just puts everyone in a hotel with meal and taxi vouchers, without questions. I may have had slightly better privileges because of my gold airline status, but it appears that everyone was being housed for the night, at least.

What really made the difference for me, however, was the level of service that I received along the way from people who knew that they worked for companies with stupid processes and policies, and did whatever possible to make things better for me:

The SAS agent in the lounge in Oslo worked diligently on my behalf on the phone for over 30 minutes, and apologized when he couldn’t do more.
The Lufthansa agent in Frankfurt was cheerful, even though she had been dealing with irate customers for several hours, and told me how nice the hotel was that she was sending me to (she was right).
The Radisson Blu Frankfurt, in addition to being a lovely hotel, has excellent staff. In particular, when I slept in this morning and missed the breakfast for which Lufthansa had provided a voucher, Nawid at the front desk had a great solution: he ordered me room service breakfast to eat in lobby, even though I had already checked out, and covered it with the voucher. He even thanked me for being tolerant of their rules about using the voucher (it couldn’t be used for lunch, only breakfast), and cajoled me into a much more extravagant breakfast than I would have ordered – I won’t need to eat all the way to Toronto.

To top it off, I also met Graham, an Australian trying to get home, in the line at the airport; we ended up at the same hotel and had dinner and a really interesting chat together. The whole effect – except for the extra stressful hours spent in the airports – has been to have a good dinner, a long restful night and a great breakfast at a nice hotel in Frankfurt, for free. And since I only had carry-on luggage, I even had clean clothes to put on today. Of course, if I weren’t on my way home to a chore-free Saturday, I might not be so sanguine about all this.

Severe delays due to weather don’t happen that often, so I can understand that the processes around them might be a bit inefficient; however, some of these seemed excessively bad. Some things that could have been improved in the Frankfurt rebooking process:

Email or text customers to tell them when they have been rebooked on a later flight. If I had known that, I would have had much less stress during my long wait. This would also reduce the number of people in the line, and the number that have to be processed manually.
Email or text electronic vouchers or confirmations for the hotel, with an option to accept (and go straight to the hotel) or decline and wait for individual service. That’s harder to do for taxi vouchers, but I would have gladly paid my own taxi fare to avoid the 2+ hour wait in line.
Triage the line so that people who can still get out on a flight that day are handled first. Since it was 7pm by the time that I got into line, there were probably very few people in that situation, but they were a bit desperate. Their rebooking would take much less time with no hotel or taxi vouchers, and they would be on their way much more quickly if just pushed to the front of the line, without risking them being delayed overnight. Or, if my first point was implemented, they wouldn’t even be in the line since they’d be automatically rebooked for their next flight.
Implement a better hotel and taxi voucher system that doesn’t require the agent to write all the information by hand. Once she had booked me at the Radisson online, if the system had printed both the hotel voucher and the taxi vouchers directly, that would have saved 10-15 minutes – it was the single biggest amount of time that I spent with her.

Travel has become so competitive these days that airlines need to make the experience better for their customers. That’s not just the “happy path” experience, when everything goes right, but the exception paths as well. Broken processes will eventually lead to customer attrition, no matter how good your customer service.

Why Lean is the new business technology imperative #BTF09

I’ve moved from the Gartner BPM summit in Orlando to Forrester’s Business Technology Forum in Chicago, where the focus is on Lean as the new business imperative: how to use Lean concepts and methods to address the overly complex things in our business environment.

Mike Gilpin opened the conference with a short address on how our businesses and systems got to be so bloated that lean has become such an imperative, then Connie Moore took over for the keynote. From the keynote’s description on the event agenda site:

Lean is not a new business concept — but it is enduring. By embracing Lean years ago, Toyota reached No. 1, while rivals GM and Chrysler collapsed into wards of the state. In its broadest sense, Lean seeks to better satisfy customer needs, improve process and information flows, support continuous improvement, and reduce waste. Today’s recession is a clarion call for businesses and government to reexamine and reapply Lean thinking across people, processes, and technology. When maintenance eats 80% to 90% of IT budgets, it’s beyond time to examine Lean approaches — like process frameworks, cloud computing, SaaS, Agile methodologies, open source, or other fresh ideas. And when the sheer complexity of technology overwhelms information workers, it’s time to simplify and understand what workers really need to get their jobs done. And by focusing on Lean now, your organization will be positioned to power out of the recession and move quickly into the next new era of IT: business technology — where business is technology and technology is business.

She started with discussions about how Lean started in manufacturing, and you can see the obvious parallels in information technology. In Lean manufacturing, the focus is on eliminating waste, and everyone owns quality and problems are fixed at the source. Lean software isn’t a completely new idea either, but Forrester is pushing that further to change “information technology” to “business technology”.

Lean is not just operational, however, it’s also strategic, with a focus on understanding value. However, it’s usually easier to get started on it at the operational level, where it’s focused on eliminating waste through improving quality, eliminating non-productive time, and other factors. Lean can be counterintuitive, especially if you’ve been indoctrinated with an assembly line mentality: it can be much more efficient, for example, for individuals or small teams to complete an entire complex task from start to finish, rather than have each person or team perform only a single step in that task.

Moving on to the concepts of Lean software, she started with the results of a recent Forrester survey that showed that 92% think that enterprise software has an excessive cost of ownership (although personally, I’m not sure why they bothered to take a survey on something so incredibly obvious 🙂 ), and discussed some of the alternatives: SaaS such as Google Apps, open source or free software and other lighter weight tools that can be deployed at much less cost, both in licensing costs and internal resource usage. Like Goldilocks, we need to all start buying what’s just right: not too much or too little, in spite of all those licenses that the vendor wants to unload at a discount before quarter-end.

Looking at the third part of their trifecta, there’s a need to change IT to BT (business technology). That’s mostly about governance – who has responsibility for the technology that is deployed – and turning technology back into a tool that services the business rather than some separate entity off doing technology for its own sake. What this looks like in practice is that the CIO is most likely now focused on business process improvement, with success being measured in business terms (like customer retention) rather than IT terms (like completing that ERP upgrade on time, not that that ever happens). Stop leading with technology solutions, and focus on value, flexibility and eliminating waste. You can’t do this just by having a mandate for business-IT alignment: you need to actually fuse business and IT, and radically change behaviors and reporting structures. We’re stuck in a lot of old models, both in terms of business processes and organizational models, and these are unsustainable practices in the new world order.

There were some good questions from the audience on how this works in practice: whether IT can be Lean even if this isn’t practiced elsewhere in the organization (yes, but with less of an effect), what this means for IT staff (they need to become much more business focused, or even move to business areas), and how to apply Lean in a highly regulated environment (don’t consider required compliance as waste, but consider how to have less assembly-line business processes and look for waste within automated parts of processes).

The five dysfunctions of a team #GartnerBPM

Jeff Gibson of the Table Group gave the morning keynote based on some of the concepts in his colleague’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable.

He started with the idea that there are two requirements for a company’s success: it has to be smart (strategy, marketing, finance, technology) and it has to be healthy (minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, low turnover). Although a lot of management courses are focused on the smart side, the healthy side is a multiplier of the smart side, boosting the success far beyond what you can do by being smart alone.

He then moved on to the five dysfunctions of a team:

Absence of trust, specifically personal trust and exposing vulnerability to other team members. The role of the leader is to go first in order to show that it’s okay to make mistakes.
Fear of conflict, which can lead to misunderstandings because people don’t speak their mind. The role of the leader is to search out conflict amongst team members, draw out the issues and wrestle with them.
Lack of commitment, particularly to tough decisions. The role of the leader is to force clarity and closure on those decisions to ensure that everyone is committed to upholding them.
Avoidance of accountability. The role of the leader is to confront difficult issues, such as problematic team behaviors.
Inattention to results. The role of the leader is to focus on collective outcomes, not allowing a “superstar” on the team to make themselves look good to the detriment of the team result.

Usually I find these external keynotes that are unrelated to the conference subject to be so-so, but I really enjoyed this one, and could have used this advice when I was heading up a 40-person company. I’ll be checking out the book.

Kathleen Barret, IIBA, on the Business Analyst role #ogtoronto

Kathleen Barret of the International Institute of Business Analysis discussed how the role of Business Analyst moved from assistant Project Manager and scribe to the focal point for understanding and articulating the business need for a solution or change.

She started by talking about why there is such a strong case now for business analysts. Organizations have been designing solutions for years without proper business analysis, resulting in a spotty success rate; in today’s economy, however, no one can afford the misses any more, prompting the drive towards having solid business analysis built in to any project. There’s also a much stronger focus now on business rather than technology in most organizations, with business strategy driving the big projects.

IIBA was created 5 years ago to help support business analysis practices and create standards for practice and certification. Its goals are to develop awareness and recognition of the BA role, and to develop the BA Body of Knowledge (BABOK) to support BAs.

Business analysis is about understanding the organization: why it exists, its goals and objectives, how it accomplishes those objectives, how it works, and how it needs to change to meet its objectives and future needs. As Barret points out, there’s a big overlap with what business architects do (she posits that they are now the same, or that an enterprise business analyst is the same as a business architect – I’m not sure that IIBA has a well-thought-out position on this yet); the difference may be purely a matter of scope, or of general analysis versus project-specific analysis.

The BA works as a liaison amongst stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to processes, policies and systems. This could be at the enterprise level – probably what most of us would refer to as a business architect – or at the project level. This can be a subject matter expert or domain practitioner (which I don’t consider a true BA in many cases) or a consultative BA who works with SMEs to elicit business requirements. In a large, complex organization, there may be several types of BAs: there is a need for both specialists (in terms of business vertical, methodologies and technologies) and generalists.

IIBA will continue to extend the BABOK, and will be releasing a competency model by the end of 2009 to help BAs identify gaps in their capabilities and to help organization to assess current needs and capabilities. In my experience, “business analyst” is one of the most over-used and misused term in business today, so anything that IIBA does to help clarify the role and expected capabilities has to help the situation.