By Steve Blais
June 3, 2025
As business analysts, we are aware that we tend to play many different roles in your organization. Each role that we play is related to analyzing business problems and defining solutions, but that general corporate problem-solving profession can include anything from assisting upper level management in a merger and acquisition to defining the layout for accounting report and anything in between. How does it happen that we go for a job interview for a business analyst with our umpteen years of experience that our experience is not applicable? While the discussion of the wide breadth of the business analysts focus might be a good discussion for some later article, but I am wondering is how did we evolve to this point? Did the first business analyst just keep taking on more work and challenges until we are now Jack of all trades? The organization seems to think that if no one else can figure out what to do, call and the business analyst.
The Perpetual Business Analyst
We do know that business analysis has been around as long as there has been business. Somebody had to decide how many fish will equal one deerskin back when trading first started and evolved into Business. Some have said that business analysis started with the evolution of programmable computers from electronic accounting machines. I’m not sure about that because I did business analysis flavored work on electronic accounting machines back in the late 60s.
We also know that there were people who defined requirements. As a programmer, programmer analyst and the system analyst over the years I defined a lot of requirements, and even had the title been available, we might not have adopted the title of “business analyst” because, let’s face it, we were computer analyst not business analysts. I’m sure there were positions associated with technology and computers which bore the title “business analyst” here and there, just as the title solution architect started. In the 1980s, even though no one really knew what a solution architect was.
The First (R)evolution: The Business Analyst Comes Forth
In the early 90s, James Hemmer and Mike Champion wrote a book titled “Reengineering the Corporation”. Many looked on this book and the concepts it espoused as revolutionary. The book described technological advances which organizations could use to streamline their business processes, remove silos and significantly improve organizational communications. It required changes to mindsets and significant investment in technology. Organizations undertaking a reengineering effort reported significant success which meant that Board of Directors and CEOs jumped at the opportunity to use technology to solve the problems. The concepts were sound, but not particularly revolutionary.
Unfortunately for many companies, reengineering simply did not work and ended up costing the organizations a lot of money in technology for not a lot of return. Hammer and Champy and the executives didn’t realize that no matter how good technology is, it could not change the mindsets of human beings. For example a cornerstone of the reengineering approach is the installation of local area networks and email so that a business process could be tracked from beginning to end across departmental boundaries and dissolve inter-corporate jurisdictional disputes, in other words silos. The human factor turned out to be stronger and more entrenched than the benefits of technology could overcome. So in a few years the bloom faded from the reengineering flower and in many cases it became a bad word in corporate board rooms if not an outright joke.
This overall effort seemed to prove Peter Drucker’s statement, “there is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” While Hammer and Champy advised that organization should annihilate before they automate, that is eliminate their old manual processes along with the mindset that goes with those manual processes, create new processes based on automation.
Despite the failure of reengineering as a major new technological effort, two benefits stayed with us: the first was the concept of using existing and proven technology (in this case the LAN) which for many organizations at the time was cutting edge, and the advent of the business analyst. Since most organizations needed to evaluate their existing manual and semiautomated business processes, they needed professionals to perform that evaluation and make recommendations for improvements, and thus was born the business analyst professional.
The Second (R)evolution: Software Development
It isn’t a stretch to consider that the technological change in software development heralded by the Agile Software Development movement in the early 2000’s starting with the Agile Manifesto might be considered as big a revolution as Business Process Reengineering. The basis, however, is the same: why are we using old technology to develop software when we have new technology available to us. Nearly all of the practices and techniques introduced by the various agile approaches (Scrum, extreme programming, Feature Driven Development, and others from the 1990s, as well as Scaled Agile Framework, and others more recent) are not new, but are clever and sometimes brilliant uses of existing technology. For example, automating testing and configuration management.
The current “revolution” is still ongoing although we may be in the “late adopters” stage. Technology must take another major step forward by making data a marketable commodity and the basis for much of what we are doing today in marketing, sales and production. Big Data is the technology that allows massive amounts of data to be collected, analyzed, and accessed for use by predictive analytics, descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, prescriptive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and a whole host of other applications, some of which are still in development. Add to that the Internet of Things and high-speed networks and cloud technology and you have even more data that can be streamed into the organization for use in the analytics processes. This technological advancement has led to the “revolution” being termed “Digital Transformation”.
What effect has this “revolution” had the business analyst? For a good number of years after the start of the “Agile transformation”, business analysts were excluded from the party. Many of the agile approaches either had no role for a business analyst, or flat out rejected business analyst as a position which added no value to software development. Since we business analyst realize that we do in fact add value to the organization by identifying business problems and providing alternate solutions through our expert analytical skills, the business analyst accepted their expulsion from agile software development projects and moved instead to a more strategic problem domain position still defining problems and recommending solutions, but on a more corporate level. (There are many, including myself, who believe that the strategic role might be the logical evolution for the business analyst role) And over the past 10 years or so the business analysts are finding themselves back in software development projects as business analysts and providing facilitation and communication with the customers, product owner and the rest of the organization as needed.
The Third (R)evolution: Digital Transformation
You can see some similarities to the earlier Business Process Reengineering in that Digital Transformation is about major changes to the business, disruption, rather than automation which is more in the lines today of continuous process improvement, or in other words, small changes to the business processes that increase efficiency or effectiveness.
Clearly this is a significant change not only in organizations, both on the IT and the business side, but also for customers of those organizations and ultimately the business analyst. And it is simply a matter of business analysts redirecting or adjusting to a new technological environment. Consider the following:
- up until now a business analyst has been focused on business processes and improving those processes to increase revenue or decreases costs in the organization; now, the business analyst has to be more focused on data in all its ramifications since the technologies are based on data, and there is little business process involved in extracting actionable insights from that data
- up until now the business analyst has been focused on internal systems and processes and our “customer” has been the internal users, managers, sponsors, etc.; now, the business analyst will be talking directly to the customers of the organization, as well as vendors, and other external roles which require a completely different engagement model and analytical tools.
- Our focus over the years has been on the business and what the business needs to do leaving the technology and how it’s done to the solution team; it is more important for us nowadays to understand concepts like Big Data, the Internet of Things, and so forth in order to effectively meet the challenges inherent in today’s world of analytics.
- If we were focused on getting a problem from the internal stakeholder and developing the requirements to solve it, that will no longer work; today our job is to help the business defined their questions and identify their problems and organize that information to determine what data is necessary to solve the problem, and where that data will come from, and how that data must be presented to produce a solution
- except for determining potential error conditions we haven’t spent a lot of time asking “what if…?”; With Big Data, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, and so forth we have the ability to make projections into the future and the organization will certainly look to us to do so.
There will still be a need and a big demand for business analysts working in the traditional mode. But as organizations evolve with Digital Transformation and the new technologies, the business analyst must also involve, preferably in the same direction. This is not a revolution so we don’t have to join in or get out of the way. We can evolve ourselves toward data and the new technologies and begin to take a larger interest in the consumers and external customers, and tickle our curiosity to start asking more questions.
Steve Blais, PMP, PMI-PBA, is an author, consultant, teacher, and coach who has over 55 years’ experience in Information Technologies working as a programmer, tester, project manager, business analyst, system analyst, general manager, and corporate executive. He has helped start up five different technical companies over the years.
Steve is the author of Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success (John Wiley, 2011) and co-author of Business Analysis for Practitioners: a Practice Guide (PMI, 2014) and a contributor to the Business Analyst Body of Knowledge, V3 (IIBA, 2015). His new book, The Digital Transformation of Business Analysis, published by IIBA Press, 2023.
