Hi everyone,
First of all, thank you for clicking on this topic.
I am recently been put in charged of a local system integrator in Vietnam as an independant senior consultant for the board of director. My role involving a development of a grand strategy to enhance the company service capability thus generating service revenue.
The company is currently operating by reselling tier-1 vendor hardware, providing infrastructure integration service and *some* infrastructure management software integration. The company has very good connections to a lot of CIO of important customers (through hardware selling) and is currently leveraging those to bring software solution to these clients. There are software vendors who are willing to work with us to sell their solution through us to the end-users. So you see, my company is trying to evole to a business model similar to usual name like IBM Services, EDS, Accenture, Capgemini ...etc but with a more local touch.
Many of you here are active BA and I guess the above information is not very strange to you. So I am looking for comments for my questions as of below:
a. As a software vendor, do you find that 3rd party business analyst effort is useful for your deployment to the customer (aka outsource the business analyst part to an SI) ? Why or why not ? What is the usual pitfall ?
b. Since we will have to deal with commercial-off-the-shelf product alot, is there any framework where I can systematically *compare* and analyse the gap between the COTS functionality with customer's requirement ?
c. If I have to build a team from scratch, what sort of direction I should be looking at ?
I have a 13 years engineering, business and alliance management backgroud and I've been researching about business analyst technique lately but i have NEVER worked as a technical business analyst (on an engineering level I mean). What sort of difficulties that I will face ?
Thank you very much if you can help with any comments.
Tan