Hi Engle,
You said: "1. I spoke to an IT colleague of mine, who iis now a BA. He said he never took any formal course and is quite successful. He gained specialized BA experience in Investments. So my question is : Do BA's specialize ? i.e. BA in Investment systems, BA in healthcare systems ?."
The answer is that analysis is a completely transferable skill but most employers do not realise that so most BAs do end up specialising...but they don't need to!
You said "2. There can be a natural progression from techie to BA. Programmer to Programmer/Analyst to xxxAnalyst to BA. The difference is that one is moving from predominantly hard-skills (computer) to more of the soft-skills (people). While techies tend to be abrupt and see things in black/white, yes/no, on/off; analysts tend to be approachable and deal well with ambiguity. Thoughts on transitioning ?"
As an ex-assembler mainframe programmer I know what you mean! Techies may inhabit a binary yes/no world but in the real world fuzzy logic (check it out on Wikipedia) is the norm. Ambiguity is the analysts' enemy and our analytical tools exist largely to slay it. Analysis is a technical skill (albeit not in the IT sense) focusing on applied logic. Unfortunately we need people skills to work with end users and IT techies (I say unfortunately because it takes up a lot of time and effort on essentially massaging peoples' egos).
Thoughts on transitioning? It's a $%^&%^!!! The best technique seems to be to work out what you want to do, get working alongside a project and volunteer for the bits you want to do then formalise your volunteering as a change of role as soon as you can - or update your CV with the BA work you have been doing albeit as a volunteer and get another job.
Good luck and let me know how you get on!
Guy