Tank,
Valid points. A BA needs to know his/her domain, that is why BA ads ask for certain Business Experience .. eg. we need a BA with insurance experinece or we need a BA with Retail banking experience etc. This in part, covers the business side. The IT side is important too, because the BA sits between the Business and IT, and therefore what the BA "records" needs to be implementable by IT.
I have worked on projects where none of the BAs understood the business and it took us 18 months to learn the business and in the process we created reames of paper. We had NASA and SWIFT advise us on how to do very large projects. To allay the clients fears, we built a prototype and showed them how it will work. In the end, we were 250 programmers and designers on the job and we delivered; and to-date its probably one of the most successfull large scale projects.
Nowadays, when I do assignments, I sometimes use 3 people (or split myself into three). One to listen for process (me); one to listen for structure and business rules (seasoned data analyst) and a person-friday to take ruff notes during our initial interviews.For example the customer might say " we only sell to plumbers on our books and at month end we create invoices and they pay us 7 days later" My data analyst would model this. I would then qualify the statement " so if someone comes off the street and wants two of your little do-dats that you sell, do you first capture their customer data? If the business manager says "no we dont capture their data , we do have cash sales". I would then qualify "so you do sell to people that arent your regular plumbers?". While all this is happening my data analysts will draw linkages between entities (associations: optionals, mandatory, 1-to-many, crows-feet etc, ). Occasionally my data analyst will interject and ask, "so you have cash clients and normal debtors for whom you only capture the billing address, is that so?". Sometimes the client would reply, "no, we have corporate clients that allows their local offices to buy from us, but they want a consolidated invoice by region" This statement introduces a few new data modelling entities. To get a feel for the process, I would then ask things like "so, what happens when a plumber, who is already a customer turns up at one of your shops, step me through the process?" Later I might ask, step me through the process when the plumber is not a customer; and later still, I will ask what happens if the plumber is from Joe National Franchise, a corporate client, you know the one where you have to give consolidated invoices to. Note I ask the questions about the norm first, then I deal with the exceptions (Cash and Corporate customers). And off we go ...
When we huddle after the interviews, we compare notes. But principally we check whether the process and data represent the business domain and the clients needs
It works!
warm regards,
K