I Know Nothing and I've Spent Years Studying It

By Jason Hurst

The nod accompanied with a sage “Right, right” or a surprised “Oh, OK”. We’ve all seen it. That is the reaction our relatives, friends, and clients reply with after being told your chosen occupation of Business Analyst (BA). I normally compulsively respond by launching into a tirade of metaphors, rationalisations and justifications (in that order) in an attempt to verbally beat into them some meaning of the term, their natural response being to cower and claim to see the light, “Yes, yes I know what you mean, please stop, I promise I really do....”.

Why is it that everyone seems to know what a Business Analyst is and yet for any particular role the activities involved can vary so considerably? The term Business Analyst itself must be somewhat to blame. A perfectly concocted adjunct to every school of business, it intuitively appeals to a very large range of solution seekers to whom a Business Analyst sounds like exactly what they need, they may not be sure how to use one, but they’re absolutely going to get one. Before they’re all gone.

I’ve been running into a few of these conversations lately and after listening to colleagues, clients and my own verbal diatribes on the subject I noticed that I enjoyed all of the different aspects that were being mentioned and had at least participated in every one of them from documentation projects to interaction design, from quality assurance planning to facilitating workshops and drafting requirements templates (actually not all of that was fun). Then it hit me, not only can a BA do all of those individual tasks, but the ability of a BA to perform across numerous functional areas, knowledge domains and even across multiple industries was the quintessential attribute of a Business Analyst that bought the career to me in the first place.

Due to an obsession with the automotive kingdom and its history I find myself always defaulting to visualising ideas in reference to cars and things mechanical. When asked about what I ‘see’ as the BA role I cannot help but conjure the mental image of the oil and engines, protecting the piston, rings and bore form mutual self destruction. Although the consequences in the real world are not usually quite that bad, the benefits of the role as an intermediary between parties in a venture are very plain to see. An understanding of each party’s nomenclature, culture, tendencies, objectives, priorities and the implications of decisions on those aspects are essential to the correct evaluation of benefits and costs are being conveyed and assigned. Why has this become necessary? As the exponential rate of development and discovery has enlarged the knowledge domains of most human endeavour, the time needed to be proficient in any single one has increased, leaving less time to be spent within other areas, evident especially in areas such as computer and information science and biology but prevalent to some degree everywhere. This is of course not a bad thing. Specialization and division of labour are essential to efficient operation of the macroeconomic machine, however it does not come without difficulties and as the detailed intricacies of jobs require more and more time to master, the value of individuals with cross functional skills to an organization also grow rapidly.

Knowledge silos and the idea that we are creating barriers to communication and resource application independency due to the size and complexity of the knowledge domains associated with a particular pastime or occupation create distinct obstacles and opportunities which require someone with the awareness and requisite multi-skilled toolbox to overcome and take advantage of. Within this framework all of the definitions of Business Analysis become valid, all of the tasks, role descriptions and activities are skills which can deployed to help facilitate better communication, understanding, insight, empathy, prioritization and enjoyment within organizations. I have resisted the urge to place ‘organizational goals’ on that list, as I’m not sure that if the listed benefits were not already in place, the organizational goals were correct in the first place, that is, without mutual understanding, aggregate goals imply different priorities for different groups within an organization. Different priorities mean different benefits and costs of decisions. This leads to the situation when even if all aspects of a particular project are executed well, the benefits delivered and the overall objectives of the organization are not being met.

There are existing frameworks and tools that attempt to deal with this holistic view of the role. They combine tools within an organization and environment wide process. Tools can include IS/IT demand and supply analysis, several good maturity models, the application portfolio management framework, critical success factors, value chain analysis, balanced score cards and numerous other very highly rated terms on Digg. A couple are – subjectively – very good, but very few have been implemented in their entirety in organizations and a holistic approach implemented as anything less than such would not produce results commensurate with expectations.

Inevitably the question arises that if individuals cannot find the time to learn understanding of knowledge areas other than their own, how is a Business Analyst supposed to do that? Firstly, purely from personal observation and conversations that most people could make the time, but the perceived value to someone who is very proficient at their job of learning additional skills is lower than the cost of the lost leisure time, this ironically magnified through misunderstanding of others organizational functions and incorrectly valuing their role’s importance. A Business Analyst, aware of their own lack of understanding and approaching each area with an open mind can more accurately value what are the aspects of a knowledge domain essential to shared communication with others and weight their focus towards those attributes, and eliminate a significant amount of non-essential detail.

What does this mean for the organization and individual Business Analyst? Firstly I believe there is a great opportunity available to us to create a truly valuable role within an organization. It’s all too easy to overlook the intangible aspects of communication, understanding, and the so called soft skills. There is a tendency and pressure from management groups and human resource companies to be able to define roles as a set of checkboxes, the three sentence job description. I don’t believe a Business Analyst has or should fit necessarily into someone else’s perception of roles within an organization, after all aren’t we trying to fill in the gaps in everyone else’s understanding? To ‘bridge the gap’ between groups. To be the person to turn to get clarification or to find out where to get it from. I believe a BA can be the recent graduate working out a new documentation system or a seasoned veteran acting as a sounding board for the CEO, the essential aspect being the BA’s ability to act as the interface to the unknown, to know what we don’t know or know where to start looking for it.

The need for this role and all of its sub tasks will only grow within the organization. I believe the worst thing we could do for it right now is try to restrict what it is to fit to others perceptive frameworks. Let’s not start adding subscripts and postscripts to the name. There is Financial Accounting Documentation Business Analyst Specialist. Put role expectations and requirements in the description not the title and let people aim to be a Business Analyst not a tiny segment of what it can be. That way I can tell my mom that my job is to know what we don’t know. ***

Jason Hurst is Managing Director of Prevede Dynamics. He is a multifaceted Business Analyst who works with organizations across many industries to develop and implement innovative solutions to problems and to enable access to new opportunities. Jason holds a Bachelor of Science, Information Systems, Bachelor of Business, Finance & Economics and Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, all from Massey University, New Zealand, Auckland & Palmerston North, New Zealand. He now makes his home in Calgary. Jason can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .