What IT Industry Leaders Have to Say

I’ve been interviewing several industry luminaries over the past few weeks, and have several more lined up.  I won’t divulge who they are at this time, but suffice it to say they are leaders in the field.

Having read most of their work it’s been a great opportunity to ‘double-click’ past their published material and find out their personal history, what drives them, their insights on the current state, how we got here, and where – in their opinion – we’re heading as an industry.

From memory, here are a few tidbits that stuck in my mind from the interviews so far to give you a taste :)

• When attempting business improvement should we really be trying to change an organization’s culture, or is it wiser to work with it?
• When it comes to trying to bridge the Business-IT chasm, what impact does ‘who’ and ‘how’ a message is delivered have on the message itself.
• What aspects become important as we try to scale agile?
• The key to good requirements is a tolerance for ambiguity coupled with a drive to specificity when the time is right

We’re in final preparations for publishing, so this interview series should be launching very soon.  I’ll post here when and provide links when it does go live.

The Game is Changing

Where is your project's goal-line?  Where is that line you cross then breathe a sigh of relief and celebrate accomplishment?  For many it is when user-acceptance tests had passed, and the necessary documents were signed, and then the party begins.  The team pats each other on the back, the project manager gives a speech recounting the personal sacrifices made during the 'crunch', and a glass is raised.  In a few days or a week most are off on other projects, their focus reset to a new goal line off in the distance while the last project begins to fade from memory.

So what happens to the newly created application?   Why did we build it again?  Oh right - to support or fulfill some function of the business.  Possibly a critical function of the business.  So there are a few steps remaining.  The application needs to get deployed, made operational, users trained, and (fingers crossed) delivering business value.  Maybe it's an application that manages and supports new drug trials, or tracks the import and export of commodities, or provides online trading, or any number of other business functions.   To the business, until the application starts supporting these functions it is a cost (often a large cost) with zero associated benefit.  A 'negative'.

The goal-line is shifting for application development teams.  The game is changing.  A couple of trends are underway that are moving the goal-line towards 'closing the loop'.

The first trend is DevOps – the gradual melding of Development and Operations.  Much of this is a necessity to support the faster and more effective deployment of applications as part of the shift to continuous delivery of applications.  Related pressures are simply that the costs from inefficiencies between the two groups is forcing barriers to drop and their processes to be intertwined.

 Another trend is where projects are becoming more accountable for business value delivery, as opposed to software delivery.  This is largely in response to the dismal track record of IT software projects where rate of 'successful' delivery has been stuck in the 25-35% range for almost two decades now. 

By responding to these trends the original purpose of the project instead of getting foggy or lost along the way, now becomes the goal-line.   The loop gets closed.  No pats on the back, no parties until the delivered application actually fulfills its mandate.   With all eyes trained on this goal-line and with every daily decision weighed against this objective, the chances of hitting it go way, way up.

Business Analysts In Demand

It’s very exciting being involved in a profession that is both vital to businesses, but also rapidly evolving and maturing (or ‘growing up’) at the same time.  Business Analysis had its first professional organization form only ten years ago.  Since that time it’s grown to be a global organization with membership in the neighborhood of 30,000, there’s a Body of Knowledge for the profession that will have its third edition published soon, and it has an accreditation program established.  

Recently a much larger organization, the Project Management Institute, has announced it will be focusing much more on servicing the needs of the BA profession as well.

The many companies I’m fortunate to visit in my role represent a broad cross-section of almost every industry you can imagine and in every case I see a strong need for skilled Business Analysts.

IT Business Edge published Top 10 Most In-Demand IT Job Titles in which "Business Analyst" ranked sixth.  CNN Money lists "Business Analyst" as one of the Best Jobs in America, in an analysis that spans all industries, not just IT.  More recently CIO Magazine ranged "Business Analyst" as the number four Most Difficult to Fill IT Roles.

Just three data points of many I'm seeing that all point to the same conclusion:  It definitely looks like those in, or entering, the BA profession have lots of opportunity ahead!