The New Age Business Analyst is here

With over a decade of experience working as a business analyst, I have been a staunch believer of the saying “once an analyst, always an analyst”. Being a business analyst for a significantly large part of my IT career, I often thought about the evolution and transformation of a Business Analyst through these years. Ever since the role of a Systems Analyst conceived in the late seventies, there have been numerous changes to the name, role, responsibilities, job description and others.

From the modest roots of being able to understand, specify and communicate the problems and requirements through to that of a product owner and a change agent, the role of business analyst has gone through significant shifts along the continuum. For the sake of simplicity, I wish to call the old age business analyst, a “traditional” one and I prefer to call the modern avatar as the “New Age” business analyst. In this post, let me bring out the main differences between these and in the process, present and unveil Texavi’s New Age Business Analyst.

Traditional Business Analyst

Besides many other activities, traditionally business analysts have been gathering, analysing and specifying the requirements of a product, system or application. That role was specifically considered as the “requirements” person in the team. Largely for the most part of the late 1980s and early 1990s, analysts used to be part of the support team rather than the development team. Eventually business analysts transformed themselves into customer-facing roles with business acumen and domain knowledge. Systems analysts slowly turned into business analysts with an emphasis on the functional knowledge and awareness about the business and markets at large.

Business analysts moved on from a mere support role, and slowly their contribution and the recognition therefrom, in the product development lifecycle was perceived to be at par with the other prominent roles like programmers and architects. This gave rise to a new version of the business analysts in the form of subject matter experts (SME). Also referred to as functional consultants and domain experts, these business analysts have been adept in their business areas. They possessed the right blend of industry experience and expertise, alongside a dash of  IT exposure. They used to be the professionals with vast experience in specific industry verticals such as banking, manufacturing, healthcare etc. Analysts in these times started going beyond requirements and contributing more value to the product, business, customers and users.

The evolution of New Age Business Analyst

The business analysts as we see today are increasingly more empowered, and influential compared to their traditional counter parts. This transformation has been rather more pronounced and visible more so in the last 6 years, with the advent of agile processes. Its an encouraging trend that several organisations in the IT industry have been embracing with open arms different agile methodologies such as SCRUM, TDD (test driven development), BDD (behaviour driven development) and user stories. Also the transformation has been augmented by newer ways of product development, technology revolution. Market dynamics added another dimension considering that speed-to-market has been the mantra for success for most businesses today. I give below my interpretation of this in the form of a diagram, to drive home the above points.

Who is the New Age Business Analyst

I can say that the New Age Business Analyst is agile, responsive, responsible, tech-savvy and people-focused professional. They are no more restricted to requirements alone but are empowered to own the product roadmap. Though largely focused on problems space, new age business analyst facilitates the solutions by pro-actively engaging team members, management, customers, users and key stakeholders. The New age Business Analyst is neither an outsider, nor a mere consultant to find faults and present reports. They are very much part of the teams, organisation and provide timely inputs and insights through their expertise and experience. Not just advice, they jump in by rolling their sleeves and work along with the team members in addressing the problems, needs, thereby creating solutions that work for customers and users delivering a great experience. At the same time, the New Age Business Analysts strive to make the solutions commercially viable from a business standpoint.

Its with great pride and honour, I unveil the logo of Texavi’s New Age Business Analyst.

Please keep a watch on more updates, posts, applications  and news about our new initiative titled as Texavi New Age Business Analyst. Thank you and have a nice weekend!