The Community Blog for Business Analysts

My current, favourite question for Executives and Architects is “How do you see Architecture operating in an Agile environment.” This question usually elicits a wry smile and a response along the lines of “I will need to get back to you on that!” Many people are wondering how Architecture will fair in the world of Agile. My ...

The age of cloud computing is now so firmly established that research firm Gartner predicted by 2020, a corporate "no-cloud" policy will be as rare as a "no-internet" policy is today. In the same press release, Gartner went on to predict that spending on compute power sold by cloud providers will exceed that of compute power sol...

The title of this article poses a pertinent question for modern enterprises that increasingly make use of powerful high-end analytic data engines, such as Hadoop clusters and cloud-based data warehouses (see this article by Forbes, which deals with similar questions). The challenge for enterprises that use analytic engines is one of data movement...

I recently walked into a large shopping centre on a mission to buy a christening present for a friends son. I was very clear on what I wanted I just needed to find it… I was on my lunch break so I need to get the job done as I had a meeting that I needed to attend back in the office straight after lunch! I am not a frequent shopper and to b...

Have you woken up in the middle of night thinking how am I going to steer my team, give them the direction that they need but at the same time not constraint in what they want to build/deliver. I recently went through one of these night- I have joined an interesting project where we have very tight timescale to deliver a tech product to operational...

If you are building a reusable Security Product tool to specifically address Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)  Findings, should the requirements be considered Non Functional Requirements or Functional Requirements? For example if there are a number of STIGs such as: The minimum password length shall be 15 characters Th...

It’s 4:30 pm on Friday and Mr. Manager comes along to tell you that he needs you to run some important ad-hoc analysis for him. Previously this meant having to stay late at the office, writing cumbersome queries to extract business information from transactional data. Lucky for you, you’ve recently started using Temporal Tables in SQL...

Current State For many years now, the most commonly used metaphor on Business Analysis has been the “Bridge”. However, in recent past, some in the BA community have started revisiting the metaphor resulting in a debate on how relevant it is. Of course, the value business analysis can provide for an organization does not depend on how i...

Pega systems(Software Company) is the leading provider of business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions. Pega systems motto is “Build For Change” and their goal is to “eliminate software coding” and “automate manual work”. Pega systems has bee...

Requirements define the needs of the project to provide best of its utility and benefits. If they aren’t clear or analysis is not done properly, it might lead to failure of the project no matter how good the concept and design is. Just as a system is composed of various functionalities, requirements too are identified in various forms. This ...