The Community Blog for Business Analysts

Around this time 12 months ago Gartner predicted that half of EA Business Architecture initiatives in 2018 would focus on defining and enabling Digital Platform Strategies. While there hasn’t been follow up research to prove whether this prediction has come true, anecdotal evidence would suggest that the real situation is pretty close. In th...

Business development broadly refers to activities that create long-term value for an organization by implementing growth opportunities for an organization, such as forming a partnership that helps sell a product in a new market. Sales development, while closely related to business development, is a separate area that entails creating value for ...

On a recent Agile training course, the instructor opened the session by saying “Agile without a plan is just chaos!” I would like to propose that Agile without effective Architecture will eventually lead to chaos, particularly if organisations try to scale their Agile practices without some form of guiding framework. The fundamental r...

Business analysts typically gather and interpret data from many areas within an organization, finding solutions to business problems and improving business processes with all that data. A business analyst may measure and improve on such disparate things as warehouse efficiency and cloud software implementation. A marketing analyst, on the other...

My current, favourite question for Executives and Architects is “How do you see Architecture operating in an Agile environment.” This question usually elicits a wry smile and a response along the lines of “I will need to get back to you on that!” Many people are wondering how Architecture will fair in the world of Agile. My ...

The age of cloud computing is now so firmly established that research firm Gartner predicted by 2020, a corporate "no-cloud" policy will be as rare as a "no-internet" policy is today. In the same press release, Gartner went on to predict that spending on compute power sold by cloud providers will exceed that of compute power sol...

The title of this article poses a pertinent question for modern enterprises that increasingly make use of powerful high-end analytic data engines, such as Hadoop clusters and cloud-based data warehouses (see this article by Forbes, which deals with similar questions). The challenge for enterprises that use analytic engines is one of data movement...

I recently walked into a large shopping centre on a mission to buy a christening present for a friends son. I was very clear on what I wanted I just needed to find it… I was on my lunch break so I need to get the job done as I had a meeting that I needed to attend back in the office straight after lunch! I am not a frequent shopper and to b...

Have you woken up in the middle of night thinking how am I going to steer my team, give them the direction that they need but at the same time not constraint in what they want to build/deliver. I recently went through one of these night- I have joined an interesting project where we have very tight timescale to deliver a tech product to operational...

If you are building a reusable Security Product tool to specifically address Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)  Findings, should the requirements be considered Non Functional Requirements or Functional Requirements? For example if there are a number of STIGs such as: The minimum password length shall be 15 characters Th...