The Community Blog for Business Analysts

In today's management environment, new forms of and tools for corporate leadership development programs have emerged. One of the most popular development tools is executive coaching. The number of executive coaches has more than doubled in the past decade and corporate leadership development programs are utilizing their services more frequently. Ho...

The May 1, 2011 mission to find Osama Bin Laden has become one of the most celebrated military mission planning successes in recent memory due to the utilization of a little-known and seldom-used practice called the Red Team. The mission was a daring raid executed by the courageous members of the U.S. Navy SEAL DEVGRU, also known as SEAL Team Six,...

You can’t work in IT and not have watched “Office Space.” I mean, it’s a prerequisite, isn’t it? It’s like being a developer and never having heard “Code Monkey.” It’s the type of movie where you sit and nod as you laugh, recognizing it is funny because it is true. My favorite dialogue in the film is between Bob Slydell (one of the Bobs tasked w...

All plans are not good plans. In fact, even good plans can fail. We cannot predict the future – we can only imagine it imperfectly. In our companies and organizations, effective planning is a social activity. Deciding on a strategic planning process as a group, rather than as an individual, adds even greater complexity to an already complex task. C...

  People expect a lot from their information systems, but it usually it comes down to one thing: the system has to do stuff. When you talk about systems, the verbs are active: the system is running, it is executing a function, the system is responding, ....   And what do you want it to do? You want it to do as much of your business p...

Let me reprise the words of Mr. Brooks ... “… the hardest single part of software development [remains] deciding precisely what to build." Fred Brooks Author of the 1986 paper "No Silver Bullet” The unspoken corollary to this is you have to be sure you don't build the wrong system. Knowing what and wha...

Back to the nasty question - what sort of Information System shall will we build? "What sort of system do you want?" "hmmm, one that processes all our customer orders, I think. What do you think, George?" "Well Fred, I suppose so, but I know it has to be fast, and run 24/7." "OK.........(???)" We already know the problem with asking people...

Software is a uniquely new invention, different than anything else we humans have come up with in the past. ... "The software-controlled electronic information system is fundamentally different from physical labor-saving devices such as the cotton gin, the locomotive, or the telephone. Rather than extend the ability of hand motion, leg motion, ...

In Part I of this series, I introduced the concept that, from the perspective of complexity, everything exists within a system. In Part II, I outlined a three-tiered framework of effects-based thinking (EBT) and planning that is critical to understanding how change propagates throughout these complex systems - the organizations, markets and communi...

Information Systems Users don't know what they want... So, don't ask them what they want: and definitely don't write some software and then say "how's this look?". On the other hand, don't have someone spend weeks talking to various people about what they want ( and not get to talk to other people ), write it all down and deliver a document, sayin...