Lets go back to the beginning of this discussion, it seemed to be about Workflow...
Workflow is a very specific business domain, having to do with the acceptance by an organization of a unit work, and how that unit of work is processed until it reaches a finished state. A common structure is that the units flow from state to state, and changes in state are made by people or systems that receive the unit in an in-box, do what is needed, and then pass it on to the next step of the process. For a unit of work, think Purchase Order or Loan Application or some such thing, and workflow exists to process that input.
Given that domain, a Business Analyst would still do what they most always do, define the requirements for a system to support the domain. The fact ttaht a workflow looks like a Business Process is neither here nor there. Overall, I find BPM practitioners tend to be working more in the world of process improvement, such as those using Six Sigma methods. I would not suggest that this all BPM is used for, as I am a BA, but Idon't think the two roles are necessarily related or dependent on each other.
Misplaced words Guy!
You are right. a BPM is a subset of a BA. A BAs work encompasses that of what a BPM does on the whole. As you rightly said, a BA would need to do anything to get the requirements and in many instances, modeling the process helps the BA squeeze out the info from Business who have seen the new To- Be model and have ideas on that. I have to start reading the BABOK soon. Just got a copy of it. Sure is getting me excited on seeing some standards for BAs in place.
Cheers
Ken
As professions, both Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Analysis (BA) are fairly new and not yet clearly defined. I believe there is a close relationship between the two. For the Business Analyst I tend to use the definition adopted by the IIBA in the BABOK v2 which talks about the BA understanding the business problem/domain and coming up with solutions. In my opinion a Business Process Analyst does the same thing except that it only focuses on understanding and improving the business processes.
I believe that the Business Process Analyst is a specialized Business Analyst.
Take a look at this post which talks about the differences among the various BA roles:
Business Analyst Roles AKA “In Search of the Business Analysis Holy Grail”
- Adrian
In our firm (bank-insurance company, +80000 FTE worldwide) we have decided to split the roles of a business process manager (role in the business department, focusses on Business process management, improvement en operational excellence) and a business analyst (role in the ICT department, focusses on the definition of service oriented architectures). The business process manager models the business processes with the focus on the manual handling and the human interfacing with applications. The business analyst elicits business requirements based on the discussion of the procesflows with business stakeholders, and translates them into services (focus maximum re-usability of services amongst different processes).
As to "use cases": when the service oriented application architecture is drawn, a detailed functional analysis for the implementation of a component (= cluster of services with a strong binding) is done by means of use cases (= documentation of the potential use/behavior of the component).
Both roles (BA & BPM) use the same modelling tool, but work in seperate repositories. The BPM repositories are structured in a corporate business function tree, the BA repositories are structured in an enterprise domain architectures tree.
Business process manager and
The previous 2 posts have further strengthened my understanding of the roles of BA and BPM. As I continue to explore and read and study more use cases, it is indeed quite clear that a Business Process Modeler / Analyst works in the realms of the Business Analyst, but restricts itself to defining the business process at a much higher level. Understanding the current process, and then modeling the to-be process is something a core BA would not be involved in day to day work.
To state it simply, a Business Analyst can be brought into a prospective project to map out the business requirements, and in certain cases, also provide a high level definition to guide the development team as to what needs to be done. This project can range from being of critical monetary value to the company or a simple strategic fix to a minor but recurring problem that affects business.
In contrast a Business Process Analyst, would not need a so called project nor would he be required to deal with the development teams. The BPA would need to identify the existing snags in the AS-IS model and come up with a TO-BE model that is practical as well as make sure that it is a feasible solution that fixes the overall process. The BPA would always needs to look above the functional structure and move the organisation towards strong processes that cut across functions. So there are differences between a BA and a BPA.
Agreed, at the moment, there is no clear cut distinction, and in majority of the cases, it is the organisation that controls the definiton of what work their BAs carry out in their daily day to day work activities.
Regards
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