I'd like to drive the community to share their opinion on who influenced the knowledge area of business/systems analysis the most. I think it will be useful to compose a list of such persons and their impact to the area. I'll try to give an example. :)
My Vote:
Tom DeMarco: Drove home the key priciples of business analysis: Need for a logical, natural partitioning in order to properly decompose, systems at higher level of abstraction are non-sequential, and decomposition of processes require a parallel decomposition of essential interfaces.
Of course, if you are in the BPMN crowd, you just scratch your head and say "What?" to the above.
Tony
Alistair Cockburn - for his work with use cases primarily
So, I thought about De Marco as that was my entry point into analysis back in the day.
But I have to vote for the 3 amigos who invented the Unified Modelling Language (UML). Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson. Don't know enough about them to pick one in particular over the others.
Kimbo
My vote would go to Alistair Cockburn
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