I just returned from the Building Business Capabilities (BBC) conference at the beginning of November and wanted to share some themes I saw from the conference.

First, the BBC conference is the official conference of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) and the premier conference for Business Analysis, Business Architecture, Business Process, Business Rules, and Business Strategy & Transformation, so it is a jam packed conference. There were over 100 conference sessions over three days and I focused on the Business Analysis, Architecture and Strategy streams since it is of most interest to me and my employer.

I noticed three trends in the presentations that I attended:

• Increased focus on BAs being involved with any change in an organization not with just technical projects
• New roles are emerging in the BA career path such as Enterprise BA, Business Relationship Manager and BA Practice Lead
• Maturing the BA practice is on many organizations’ agenda

 
I’ll elaborate on each of these a bit.

• Increased focus on BAs being involved with any change in an organization, not with just technical projects — Thought leaders in the profession and forward thinking organizations have seen the value of having an analytical, solution agnostic, strategic thinker (aka the Business Analyst) involved in discussions about a wide variety of change planned within an organization. As keen stakeholder managers, BAs can bring a multitude of perspectives to the discussion and suggest a wide variety of solutions that can meet the needs of the organization while being financially viable. BAs encourage the development of creative, innovative solution options, and insist on thoughtful, evidence based decision making. This is always valuable.
• New roles are emerging in the BA career path such as Enterprise BA, Business Relationship Manager and BA Practice Lead — A challenge that has plagued the profession for years is the belief that the only path to promotion was to become a Project Manager. Many many BAs I have encountered did not have any desire to become a Project Manager, because they really enjoyed being in a role where they could impact business directly by understanding business needs and solutions to meet those needs. Now those roles are emerging. At a high level, the Enterprise BA is a business analyst who tackles enterprise level needs and opportunities. They are seen as trusted advisors to the executive level; able to make not only technical solution recommendations, but also organizational, process and product solution recommendations. A Business Relationship Manager is much like an enterprise BA except they service clients and ensure that the client’s needs are understood and met. Interestingly, the IIBA recently announced a partnership between themselves and the BRMI (Business Relationship Management Institute) likely because of the perceived synergies between the disciplines. For the BA Practice Lead the main responsibilities include developing and maintaining the BA processes and artefacts that exist within an organization, coaching and mentoring (maybe training) BAs new to the organization or methodology and ensuring quality is delivered by the organization’s BA practitioners, which leads to my last point…
• Maturing the BA practice is on many organization’s agenda — For the last 5 years the focus, for organizations, has been on creating a Centre of Excellence (BA CoE) for business analysis. At the BBC, this year, I noticed a broadening of the goal to “Maturing the Practice” within organizations. I completely support this because a CoE may not work for every organization, for example a small one like mine. By starting by focusing on the opportunity, like all BA assignments should, organizations can creatively design custom solutions that with address their specific concerns, and develop those solutions that deliver true value to the BA practice. I saw presentations from big retail organizations, consulting companies and insurance businesses that all understood that investing in maturing the BA practice within their organization would bring value.